Today was a very sad day indeed, it marked the day when whizz-kid Kevin Rose (an obsessive tea drinker, spends his time in between podcasting & climbing) finally unveiled his baby, Digg V4, complete with the new, next generation features. Don’t get me wrong, i LOVE Digg, or at least i ‘loved’ Digg, it came about at a time when myself and many like-minded people wanted/needed ’something’ new and along came Digg to satisfy our desires.

It was a definite case of ‘right product, right place, right time’, and i loved it! Within the first year it had so many ‘wannabe’ copy-cats that it showed for the first time on the interwebs that people wanted IN on a good thing, but they didn’t last and Digg outlived them all, evolving into the first real post-forum community that us early-adopters had ever seen, paving the way to a new buzz-word that within a few years, every account exec & company CEO involved with the web would be using, ‘Social Media’.

Digg grew & so did the community within it, it diversified onto other website platforms and grew even more, there was NO advertising, it was as near to purity as a commercial product could ever hope to achieve. Then along came Facebook, and since that, everything else in-between, up to twitter and they all had their place, market leaders in their own unique way, and Digg was right up there with them, cool, unique, desirable…Total WANT! it was an important part of my daily browsing schedule and i loved the features and how it all worked.

But business is business and all good things come to an end, and as we are told by people in power, ‘Change is GOOD!’….Maybe it is, maybe in this fast-moving internet generation i am no longer the user that Digg wants, an interwebs dinosaur, yesterdays news. It doesn’t really matter, all i know is that i’ll miss what Digg ‘used’ to be. I will not ponder the possibility of a conspiracy of why Mr. Rose’s co-director left the company 6 months ago and how Kevin is always going on about Twitter.

I will suppress the thought that Digg V4 looks like a bastard child of Twitter & Facebook, and keep those feelings to myself. All i know is that digg is no longer a unique product, it looks and behaves now like other platforms i use, it has in short become a sheep and joined the flock, no longer a leader, but now a follower.

Some people will love it, some will come to love it, and some will despise it like i do, it doesn’t matter, no one is right or wrong when it comes to their own personal opinion. all i know is that it no longer does what i need it to do :(

13 Comments

fail, holy f#ck!