Digg removes logins and brings back leaderboards

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 Mar 2010 at 10:19

Digg is planning a significant overhaul that will remove the need for users to login to recommend web pages to the site.

The changes were introduced at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), and represent "five years of significant work" according to chief executive Jay Adelson.

Perhaps the biggest change is that users will no longer need to log into the service to Digg something, with Adelson predicting that this could bolster the number of submissions from "20,000 a day to millions a day".

I should be able to send a predictable amount of traffic to those sort of smaller and medium-tier sites

Other significant changes include a "one-click" submission process, and personalised homepages for users that show content based on their interests.

"It's going to be a pretty radical set of changes," said Adelson. "If you think about Digg right now, if you put a Digg button on a page it's kind of like gambling in that if you hit, you hit big. But if you don't hit, there's not a lot of value.

"We're trying to address that as a tool. I should be able to send a predictable amount of traffic to those sort of smaller and medium-tier sites," he concluded.

Behind the scenes, Adelson claimed that Digg was trading in MySQL for an infrastructure that will be "very, very fast," though he offered no further information on the technology that would be used.

Adelson also confirmed that leaderboards rewarding the service's top diggers would be reintroduced. The feature has been trialled before, but proved so unpopular that it was dropped.

However, Adelson claimed it had been overhauled to prevent people from gaming the results. "You had the people actually at the top of the list telling us they didn't like the list. That's generally a good sign that a feature is broken."

Invites for the revamped service will be sent out over the next couple of weeks.