Digg.com is currently down, but it may not be for long: Digg CEO Kevin Rose has announced that today is the day that Digg v4, also known as the “new Digg,” goes live. If you went to the site before it went totally kaput, you received the following message: “We’ve created a monster. The new Digg will be alive momentarily.” (h/t @msaleem)
At 12:30pm ET, Digg business development chief Matt van Horn wrote, “New @Digg is launching.. right now! Hopefully we won’t break the internet in the process. GO TEAM!”
Update, 1:50pm ET: The new Digg is technically live; it is, however, really slow. Also, it appears you can’t yet log into your account, or if you can, we’ve lost patience trying. We’ll keep updating as the service rolls out.
Update2, 2:45pm ET: It’s a lot faster now and we’re able to log in, although there are pockets of downtime.
Having gotten beta invites a while back, we’ve been toying with the new Digg for a while now, but this is the first time the bulk of Digg users will be able to experience the service. In a nutshell: It’s a little bit like Twitter, with followers and followees, it’s a little bit like an RSS reader in that publishers run their news feeds through it, and it still retains a version of the old Digg front page. As The Next Web points out, the new Digg shifts the balance of power away from power users and towards publishers, but not entirely:
“Power users will hardly be on the out, they will merely look and act differently. They need the most active friends as possible, so expect people who currently are, or want to be, power users to be more social from day one. Also, some people who were moot on Digg are about to become giants. Given that Digg prompts people to follow people on Digg that they follow on Twitter and Facebook, people who were social, but never on Digg, are about to pick up handfuls of new followers.”
TechCrunch has also written a little summary of the changes to come in the new Digg; early writers’ reviews aside, the question remains whether the Digg rank and file will like or dislike the Twitteriness of the new service, but it’s undeniable that the Digg team has gone all in on a radical new look for the site.
When the dust settles, we do hope you’ll follow Geekosystem on Digg either way.
