Digg Begins Issuing User Names

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digg_usernames

What’s Digg? Digg is an online news aggregator with a curated front page featuring unique posts selected for their high-tech audience. In its heyday, Digg attracted some 200+ million monthly viewers. The service became popular because its users could vote up (digg) stories or vote them down (bury them).

The resulting “digg-effect” would send boatloads of internet traffic to websites caught up in the link sharing. Ultimately for Digg, a combination of a buggy site upgrade and power users who combined to vote up their digg stories while simultaneously voting down stories that didn’t suit their fancy brought Digg down. Oh, and this thing called Facebook gained in popularity and suddenly Digg had real competition for sharing of interesting and unique online content.

In July 2012, parts of Digg were sold and the remaining content site has been slowly rebuilding itself as part Google Reader replacement and part curated news site. Many of the news articles on the site are quite unique and appear first in Digg before being picked up my more mainstream sites.

Today the company appears to be making a first step toward the past. I notice they are providing visitors with the opportunity to claim a Digg username. While there is no way to vote up or down stories, users can like specific articles which then save those under their Digg profile name.

It will be interesting to see if this is just a first step in a site revamp. Perhaps in the future non-Digg stories might be saved by Digg users to their profile. Which, especially if users could in turn Digg these stories,  would make the new Digg start to resemble its older self.

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About the Author

Wayne Schulz
Wayne is a diehard Android user and consultant specializing in Sage 100 ERP Accounting Software. He lives in Glastonbury CT with his two children. When not helping them with their homework or pushing the latest school fundraiser off on his co-workers, he is active hiking and investigating all manner of technology.