Somewhere, throughout my vast array of email filters, I must have missed my invitation to try out the new Digg 4.0 beta / alpha system, but this weekend out of sheer curiosity, I logged into new Digg site and got to play around with what is coming up. So, without further ado, here is a look at the inside of the new Digg system.
Finding Friends
When you first login to the new Digg, it will suggest some profiles for you to follow under a variety of topics, including Business, Entertainment, Technology, and more.
New Digg Suggested People to Follow
On the next screen, you are invited to connect your Digg account to Facebook, Google, and Twitter to find your friends on Digg from each network.
New Digg Find Friends on Facebook, Google, and Twitter
If you decide to skip these options when first signing in, you can find popular profiles and check your networks later by going to My News > Find Profiles, and you’ll see a little section for My Networks on the left sidebar along with the topics you can search for popular profiles in.
New Digg My Networks
Followers and Following
One thing that was nice about the old Digg that is not available in the new Digg (not at the moment at least) is the ability to see if a person you are following is also following you.
Old Digg Mutual Friends and Fans
To see your Followers and Following in the new Digg, you can click on the links on the navigation bar.
New Digg Followers and Following
But you can only see if you are following someone – if you want to follow your new fans, you can follow them easily, but you won’t be able to see if people you follow have followed you back.
New Digg Follow or Unfollow
If you want to purge your list of non-mutual friends, you may wish to do so before the new system becomes live, just in case the new system doesn’t implement a way for you to see which of your following isn’t following you. Interestingly, I noticed that unfriending someone in the old system wasn’t reflected in the new Digg system – so if you are in both, you will want to unfollow the person in the new Digg, but if you are not, then doing it in the old Digg should carry over.
Your Profile
Another thing that doesn’t seem to be carried over from the old Digg to the new one is your list of links. To fill out your new Digg profile, click on the Settings option in the nav bar and go to Profile.
New Digg Profile Settings
Next, add your links.
New Digg Links Setting
And your new Digg profile will look like this:
New Digg Profile
Imported Feeds
You may notice at the bottom of my profile is a section for Imported Feeds. This is a feature in the new Digg system that allows you to import your blog RSS feed so that new items are automatically submitted to Digg. You can setup your blog feeds under Settings > Import Feeds.
New Digg Import Feeds
You will have to verify that you are the site owner by adding a code to one of your posts’ HTML.
This brings up an interesting question, brought up in the Third Tribe forums – will auto submitting your content be better than having a “power Digger” submit it in terms of the story’s chances of getting hot on the Digg homepage? When you choose the auto-submit feature, will you have any control over the items that you can change when you submit the items manually (title, description, images, category)? And should you only submit custom RSS feed selections?
Submitting Stories to Digg
Let’s look at the basic submission process for stories on new Digg, which is a lot more simpler than the old Digg system. If you go to either the My News or Top News tab, you will see a Submit a Link field. Just paste in your link, and the information will popup for it.
New Digg Submit a Link
You can edit the title and description, select a photo from the story, and then choose the category it best fits in and then click Digg It. Then you’re all done!
New Digg All Done
Here, it says the story is now shared with your number of followers. Any stories you Digg will be shown on your profile, as well as in the My News tab of all of your followers.
New Digg My News
When your friends submit stories, you will see which friends have Dugg it as well as a comment snippet from your friends on the story. So needless to say, when you submit or Digg a story, make a comment to have it stand out to your following.
Top News
Since the My News tab only shows items that are being dugg by friends, you have to select the Top News tab if you want to see what is hot on the homepage throughout the entire community.
New Digg Top News
Currently, the Top News and the homepage of the old Digg system (which you can be simultaneously logged into, oddly enough) do not show the same stories, but I’m sure that’s one of the many kinks to be worked out.
Disclaimer: Please note that all of the above shots are from the invite only / beta / alpha version. Some features may change once it is released live which should be somewhere around 3 – 4 weeks from now.
Your Thoughts on the New Digg
Have you gotten your invite and played around in the new Digg system? Do you enjoy the idea of just following diggs by your friends, and plan on using the import feeds auto submit feature? What other likes and dislikes have you noticed or foresee?]
PS. Follow me on the old Digg or new Digg.
This post brought to you by Kristi Hines
Kristi Hines is creator of Kikolani which focuses on blogging tips and social networking. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Kristi has written 310 awesome article(s) for Kikolani.
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{ 52 comments… read them below or add one }
Cool, I think the New Digg being more sociable will be a plus and while I do like auto submission services based on RSS, not every article is worth submitting to Digg so this can risk filling up the Digg submissions with more spam, affiliate marketing or other articles that just aren’t “Digg worthy”
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I think that’s why it would be a good idea to have a separate category for the posts you want going to Digg, that way you’re only submitting your best and not just everything. Totally agreed!
Thanks for the article Kristi.
I am just starting to think about using Digg as part of a big SEO experiment that I’m doing right now, so this post is really helpful.
There’s still plenty to learn, but I’m starting to get an idea of how I can use Digg effectively now. It looks like a lot of fun anyway.
So what is the downside to submitting less-good posts? Does that cause your better submissions to perform worse when they are published?
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I don’t think is a good idea an “auto-submitting”, unless all your articles are “digg-friendly”.
I’ve entered in the new system but for the moment I’m using the old interface.
I’ve seen many complaints (even myself) you don’t see who has submitted a history clearly, the categories are fewer, the themes interested of this person, popular stories submitted by her/him, etc etc.
Anyway, the new interface is more social and simpler.
Will see the result when it’ll launched officially this new version.
Cheers,
Gera
New from Gera @ Sweets Foods Blog Best of the Week- Blogging- Social Media- Foodies – Winner CSN Certificate
I agree with you on this Gera, the “auto-submitting” will end up with a lot of submissions that has no interest as no body will digg it!
I have tried the new Digg when I got their email invitation, and I can see how social it is! true!
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In general full automatic social bookmarking doesn’t work….may be they can allow you some control on your submissions.
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They’re suggesting you go with a category based feed – maybe yourblog.com/feed/featured so that only certain content instead of everything will be submitted.
That’s a good suggestion from them. Hope it’ll be a feed selected one.
New from Gera @ Sweets Foods Blog Best of the Week- Blogging- Social Media- Foodies – Winner CSN Certificate
It’s nice to be able to just see what your friends do – especially if you are smart and only follow people you will be interested in getting shares from!
I’m hoping a lot more things will be worked out before it goes live. That’s why they invite us betas… that way we can let them know what they need to fix before getting hit by everyone. But yes, the interface (especially submission portion) is much simpler!
I agree with Gera and its the same stance I’ve taken on StumbleUpon as well. It just doesn’t seem to work well when I auto-submit anything, except to twitter. It’s a huge wake up call that “I am NOT a power user so just don’t even go there” lol.
That said, I do like the new Digg. I don’t know that it’s more “social” but it’s certainly more usable and I just prefer the new features.
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Twitter connect part doesn’t work for me… is probably a Twitter issue.
That hasn’t worked since Sunday. Maybe because of the same issues that knocked HootSuite off last night too though.
With Stumble, it’s a bit different. They can actually ban you for submitting your own content repeatedly, while Digg is effectively saying to go for it now. As far as getting hits on Stumble though, yes, you have to have it submitted and reviewed by someone that usually doesn’t Stumble your site, isn’t in your friends list, and has a good overall “power” account.
Tia, if only more people had your common sense and honesty…! Auto-submitting needs to be approached very carefully. It is so easy to annoy followers/subscribers with high-volume feeds or poor targeting. Keep up the good work and you WILL be a “power user”.
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Thanks for the explanation of the new Digg. I think the autosubmit feature will flood Digg and leave it no better than Facebook in terms of finding valuable content. How can the cream rise to the top under the weight of all that content? I think it is a mistake they will regret.
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I think the valuable content will eventually rise because of voter support. Hopefully people won’t just vote up content because it came from their friends – that they’ll only vote up what they see is great content.
Agreed. Sounds like an opportunity for folks to spam the system to me.
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I’ve been playing around with the new Digg and imported my feeds, not convinced that it is hugely different from the old version but will give it a shot!
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I’ve decided not to import mine – I think (like the Facebook and LinkedIn link attachments) I will opt for having more control of changing the details before submitting stories vs. letting it just pick the standard title, description, and first image it picks up.
I, for one, am glad that Digg is becoming more social and interactive. It will be especially helpful that you will be able to follow the Diggs of your friends, acquaintances and (yes!) competitors. I can hardly wait.
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You have been able to do that in the old version, but now your friend’s content will be more obvious with the My News vs. Top News views.
Thanks for breaking it down. I’m not a Digg subscriber but recently was thinking about joining this community. I like a lot of the features it offers so I’m off to Digg.
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I think as a new user, you might only be able to access the older version unless you get the invite. Good luck!
Hey Kristi, what a comprehensive review! Thanks for taking the time to do this, I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but will soon. I think it is a shame that you cant see the mutual followers anymore.
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Hopefully they’ll integrate that before it goes live and I’ll be happy to update my article when they do!
I really like the part to connect to FB & Google to find friends on twitter and follow them. That’s really a smart idea which is really useful to users.
The Twitter connect hasn’t worked for me yet – I don’t know if it’s a beta bug or if I just have too many followers.
I will double check and see if it works for me. Thanks
Interesting Kristi. I am especially interested in the auto submit and it will be neat to see if is helps out of just makes their database huge and makes the site even slower than it is already. What do you think of the auto submit in terms of cluttering up the whole system?
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Like anything, there will be people who abuse it. Maybe Digg’s ultimate plan is to be able to ban anything from an entire site if it gets reported enough?
Thanks for this overview – I haven’t been on Digg in a while, but that interface looks a lot, lot cleaner.
That having been said, I’m not angry or ungrateful towards Digg, despite not using them. They still drive a lot of traffic my way even though I have zero chance of ever making front page there; their backlinks for being in “upcoming” are invaluable.
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Ah, you never know. Most of the people who make it there for the first time never expect it.
Hi Kristi! Thanks for your sharing about this information! I’m trying to utilize this new Digg feature. However, i still don’t think that i can be in front page there easily by using it.
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I try not to focus on the goal of getting to the first page, but more on the fact that you can share things more easily with friends now through their system.
Hi Kristie, not much interested in Digg. I think stumbleupon is the best tool out there.
Anyway, I had a question. What plugin are you using for displaying that author bio box at the footer of each post?
It’s not a plugin, but direct coding. I’ll email you the code!
I don’t really enjoy the idea of just being able to follow diggs from friends, your network would be limited that way. Bur since there’s a top news tab then it compensates because you will be able to see what’s hot on the entire community. I’m still thinking if I’m going to use the auto submit feature. In totality, I think I’m going to like the new digg better because of the feature of being able to submit feeds.
I am going against the auto submit feed so I can tweak the post title and description, plus pick the image I like best vs. letting Digg choose it for me. I’m a control freak though – it’s my nature.
The new Digg sucks balls.
New from The Dude Dean Social Media Sites that have Twitter Integration While Digg is still thinking about it
Well, that’s honest.
I have been hearing some really negative feedback about how the new version will destroy it, and from that side of the story, they have a good point.
Not yet play with this new Digg. However, I may choose the manual submitting since the auto usually give less power in term of unique.
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Dean you really think that the new Digg sucks? Honestly I really choose to do it still manually but I can imagine that the auto submit will help new users.
The New Digg isn’t about helping the new users, its going to help out the publishers like Mashable while trying to kill off the power Diggers. The new Digg basically turns Digg into an RSS reader.
http://www.facebook.com/BoycottDigg
New from The Dude Dean Social Media Sites that have Twitter Integration While Digg is still thinking about it
I don’t understand why they would want to “kill off” the people that bring the best content to Digg though… seems like shooting themselves in the foot. Either way, the power Diggers would still have “control” of the front page, just not the custom My News with only your friends submissions, right?
Well instead of banning one Power Digger at a time, why not get them all in one move? I’m sure this is what Kevin Rose and his boys are thinking.
http://www.facebook.com/BoycottDigg
New from The Dude Dean Social Media Sites that have Twitter Integration While Digg is still thinking about it
I stopped using Digg for quite sometimes as it does not bring much traffic to me. Maybe my methods were wrong. Will try it again.
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I’ve used Digg on a very limited scale for the past year or so (since they’ve stopped the Shout function). The whole idea of them becoming more social is absolutely awesome. I would not mind trying this out. I do love the idea that you can like your RSS feeds on Digg. It’s awesome. When is this going live? Is there any indication of when this is happening?
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I’m not very active on Digg right now but I plan to be in the future. I’m very active on Twitter but I need to step up my game on Digg. It’s good to know these new features before the upgrade… gets us prepared for what’s coming. Thanks for this thorough review… gonna tweet it and digg it too
All the best,
Eren
New from Eren Mckay Princess and the frog baby shower
thats timely and great post on new digg, i was not aware about this because i left digg long time ago…
After reading this post, i gone to digg once agian and will be looking for new social interface and ease of use…thanks for the detailed post on digg
I think the new automatic submission option can be useful for users who haven´t time to fill all of the details of a manual entry, or want to bypass their boring captcha scheme.
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I has been ages since I used Digg; nice to see they are catching up in the social arena. There has been a lot of discussion regarding the auto-submit feature and poor content, but I think voters will “rank up” the better content. It may take a while, though.
Personally, I have not had much success with Digg, hence my not utilizing it for a while. Perhaps I’ll give it another shor.
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