29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API
Posted by Tamar Weinberg on July 11th, 2007
Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some of these tools monitor upcoming and popular stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and your circle of friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools, with some being lesser known than others, but all of them having some pretty significant purpose in the life of a Digger.
1. diggwatcher is a simple application built in Flash that runs in the background and monitors a single Digg story of your choosing. You can receive sound alerts when you get new Diggs, comments, and when your story becomes popular. The script refreshes every 60 seconds.
2. The Digg Noise Filter is a tool that will let you watch upcoming stories before they become popular… that’s if you don’t want to use the regular Digg upcoming tool. (Developed by Russ Jones)
3. Digg Entourage was also developed by Russ Jones and shows you who is in your Digg social circle by avatar and also in table format (number of stories Dugg, percentage of stories Dugg, and whether they’re your friend or fan):
4. Digg comment viewer lets you see your recent Digg comments, their rankings, and you can easily navigate to your friends’ comments. You can also have it auto-update every 60 seconds.
5. Digg CommentSpy is based on a similar concept and lets you see the most recent live comments on Digg. (Developed by Alex Bosworth)
6. TINC - or Who’s Digging You? is another Alex Bosworth Digg application that lets you see who is digging your stories.
7. Digg Charts shows the most popular stories in a table format, followed by a pie graph format and a graph that shows the progression of story popularity over time.
8. Digg Alerter is a great tool for Windows users that sits in the system tray and informs you about your most recent Digg submissions (or those of another user). You can see if your submission was popular or if it’s still “upcoming.”
First, you can choose your desired username:
Then, you can see (and hear) the tool in action when there’s activity on your recent submissions:
9. Digg Wordweb allows users to visualize the most popular keywords in a Digg submission and related stories.
10. Digg Expose displays thumbnails of all recently Dugg stories:
11. DiggCity allows you to view the most recently popular 10 stories in a city format. Each stick figure represents a Digg user and the buildings grow as more people Digg the stories and run into the buildings. If you keep this running for awhile, you’ll have very tall buildings.
12. Smart Digg Button is an excellent Firefox extension that adds a “Digg This” button to the bottom of your browser when the story has not been submitted. If the story has been submitted, you will see how many Diggs it has. This is a great and handy tool for those of us who submit a story only to find out that it’s already been submitted. For those of us looking for high quality stories to submit, this button is a huge timesaver and I wish I picked it up earlier.
This is what it looks like when you still have yet to submit the site to Digg:
And this is what happens once you do:
13. Digg Pics addresses the problem that Digg has as it is still lacking a picture section. Cadu de Castro Alves created this to let you filter through promoted or upcoming stories that include (and are labeled with) pictures.
14. Diggtris is a Tetris game based on recently dugg stories. It’s actually quite fun and addictive, though what’s up with those crazy shapes?!
15. Duggback is a tool that allows you to view cached copies of pages of Digg stories that may have been taken down due to the Digg effect.
16. What about widgets? Diggest allows you to integrate Digg into your own blog or website by taking videos off of Digg and putting them into a continuous channel.
17. Similarly, the same author has built the Digg widget that shows the recent popular stories in a widget that you can put on your site.
18. Which Stories are Popular on Digg? shows which domains are most popular on Digg. While it could be more useful if it listed the domains in order of popularity, nonetheless, it’s a pretty cool list.
MANY OF my favorite Digg tools were built by Brian Shaler. I happen to know that he still has more Digg applications up his sleeve, but here are his Digg applications as of late:
19. Wheel of Upcoming is Brian’s Digg API contest entry. It allows you to visualize the upcoming stories in a particular topic and you can then spin the wheel to see each story’s details.
First, select a topic:
Then, spin the wheel and mouse over the story:
20. Digg Heat Map allows you to visualize the Digg community as a universe with the most popular Digg members appearing to be bright stars in the sky and the newest members to be in the center of the universe. You can choose a username and then see how many friends and fans the user has.
21. Digg Friends Venn Diagram allows you to see who has befriended a particular user of your choosing, who the user has befriended, and mutual friends in a Venn diagram display:
22. Digg Radar is yet another supercool Brian Shaler creation that allows you to envision the Digg community like a universe, with the newest members at the corners of the galaxy and the oldest members in the center of the galaxy. As thumbs-ups appear, you can mouse over them to see which users have been most recently active on Digg and who have Dugg a story.
23. The Map of Digg Friendship was the original concept that turned into Digg Radar. It allows you to see the number of friends and fans that you have and where you are located on the Digg map, with the oldest members being placed in the center of the galaxy.
24. Digg Status allows you to view different statistics for a particular Digg user. I chose one of the oldest Digg users for sake of illustration. Statistics include age of account, total stories Dugg, average number of stories Dugg per month, total stories commented on (as well as a monthly average), total stories submitted (and monthly average), stories promoted to the front page, number of profile views, number of friends, and number of fans.
Some Digg tools require Apollo from Adobe. Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these applications do not run under the newest version of Apollo (air_b1_win_061107.exe), so you can try downloading AIR Alpha instead. These applications are:
25. DiggGraphr Desktop: A desktop installation that will show you Digg stories in treemap format. Each section is color-coded and you can drill down and see stories that would interest you the most (e.g. Tech News, Gadgets, etc.) There happens to be a live DiggGraphr too. (Developed by Arpit Mathur)
26. D’Lite is a “miniature” version of Digg, where you can view recent popular Diggs, its description, the submitter, the number of comments, and the number of Diggs, among other very cool information.
27. Digg Watch is also a mini Digg, allowing you to view recently popular stories and see when the story was submitted/promoted and the number of Diggs/comments it has.
28. Mini Digg is a pretty cool application that shows both Digg newly popular stories, which you can filter by section, and a tracker for particular users to see their activity in Diggs and comments.
This is what the reader looks like:
This is what the tracker looks like:
(As you can tell, I Digg a lot of stories, and I comment a little bit too.)
29. Digg Top is another Adobe AIR application (though it works with the beta version of AIR, not the alpha version as linked earlier in this article). It allows you to see newly popular stories in a variety of formats. One of the better features is the ability to load pics.
You can select the representation of the Digg sections you would like to view:
All News is displayed below. My screenshot includes me performing a mouseover so that it shows the full length of the headline for another story.
If you want to see the image within the application, just click “Load Image” and here you go:
And you can also watch videos in the built-in player:
That’s all. Twenty-nine Digg API applications… for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to report on later. If you know of any others, please add them to the comments! 
54 Responses to “29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API”
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SearchRoads » sailor moon fan fiction library lemon 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API Says:
July 11th, 2007 at 6:51 pm[...] unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools for Digg users. sailor moon doujin hentai comicread more | digg [...]
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DIGG: 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API « SLeepdepD Says:
July 11th, 2007 at 8:37 pm[...] videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools for Digg users.read more | digg [...]
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Cartoons Fans Lounge Says:
July 11th, 2007 at 9:48 pm[...] in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools for Digg users. all X Men ps2 gamesread more | digg story RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Cartoons Fans Lounge [...]
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error is the mother of all inventions Says:
July 12th, 2007 at 4:09 am[...] on tht.. seems like api is any1’s playground.. all r doing apis nowadays.. good development >> No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI [...]
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All in a days work… Says:
July 12th, 2007 at 7:04 am[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API diggwatcher, The Digg Noise Filter, Entourage, comment viewer, CommentSpy, Who’s Digging You?, Charts, Alerter, Wordweb, Expose, diggcity, digg Pics, diggtris, diggest, digg widget, Which Stories are Popular on Digg?, Wheel of Upcoming, digg Heat Map… (tags: digg) [...]
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Search engine optimization - SEO Class Rides Again - Now with More Webmasterworld Pubcon and a Bullpen (Internet marketing strategy | Internet marketing online |) Says:
July 12th, 2007 at 1:06 pm[...] been up in Digg? First, I posted a nice and hopefully really informative article on 29 Tools Built on the Digg API . It took me about a month to collect that data and do the research, but it was worth it. If you [...]
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Haja’s Blog » Power of DIGG.com Says:
July 12th, 2007 at 2:03 pm[...] 18 people so far written about this app in their blog (source: technorati) - Interesting one is here http://www.techipedia.com/2007/07/11/digg-api-tools/ [...]
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Technology Talk from July 9th 2007 to July 12th 2007 » Chandrasekhar Vallabhaneni Says:
July 12th, 2007 at 8:33 pm[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API - Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API [...]
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Friday Favorites 6/13/07 - Stuntdubl - SEO Consultant Says:
July 13th, 2007 at 2:14 pm[...] Tamar has an awesome list of Digg api tools [...]
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Web 2.0 Announcer Says:
July 14th, 2007 at 9:14 am29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API
[...]Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some monitor upcoming stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictu…
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Danny and Andy Duke It Out Over Sphinn, aimClearBlog Says:
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:29 pm[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools For Diggers [...]
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9 Fantastic SEO & Blogging Articles You Need to Read- Aug. 6-07 Says:
August 6th, 2007 at 7:18 pm[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API [...]
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muhammad.saleem » how the ’social media four’ are conquering the web - part 1 Says:
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:46 pm[...] 4 months ago. in that time, there have been 10 contest-winning applications built on the api and countless more equally impressive and useful ones. as a result people are visualizing and accessing digg from many [...]
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An Open Letter to Kevin Rose » techipedia | tamar weinberg’s blog of stuff Says:
September 7th, 2007 at 9:19 am[...] me some clothes. Those of us who are big on Digg these days put in more time than most of those API developers. I know that for [...]
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Live:SMX Social Media NYC, Third Session – Social News | Squareoak: Search Engine Marketing, Web Trends & Social Media » Blog Archive Says:
October 16th, 2007 at 2:00 pm[...] A solid title and description are critical Be careful when you’re marketing your content. People are quick to point out mistakes. Make youself identifiable and create an avatar Provide all of your contact information, email, blog, name, Skype, etc. Befriend users and Digg your friends stories Comment on stories, snarky comments win on Digg Promoting your posts in private is safest. Most Diggers will bury you if you’re trying to promote. Pownce, Twittter, Facebook are good to use. You can use Digg shouts but use sparingly if at all. Enhance your Digg experience with extra tools (Smart digg buttons, a Digg alerter, Social media for Firefox) Tools are found at http://www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools/ [...]
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SMX Social Media Recap » techipedia | tamar weinberg Says:
October 18th, 2007 at 8:59 pm[...] message to the attention of the public. I alluded to some of my 11 Digg tricks and referred to my 29 Digg API tools to improve the Digging experience. Andy Greenberg at Forbes ran an educational piece on what we [...]
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Flocking Behavior and the Digg Effect in Social Media Says:
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:39 am[...] can only drive a post so far - if you ever hope to reach the front page (which may lead to the Digg Effect, if you aren’t careful). Once reaching the front page, you will see a notable flocking [...]
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Top 6 Ideas for Incredible Viral Content » techipedia | tamar weinberg Says:
October 29th, 2007 at 8:59 am[...] a bit easier, remember, tools were created out of a need. I’ve already stated that I love apps built on the Digg API, and anyone with some programing know-how can build an excellent web-based or standalone utility. [...]
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75 Suggestions, Best Practices & Resources for Digg - KoMarketing Associates Says:
November 13th, 2007 at 11:19 am[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API [...]
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Yahoo on Visualizing Community Use of Social Media Sites -SEO by the SEA Says:
December 10th, 2007 at 3:40 am[...] article also links to a blog post from Tamar Weinberg, titled 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API, which include a number that involve data visualization. Share: These icons link to social [...]
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Notifir.com » Blog Archive » Digg Tools Directory Says:
December 13th, 2007 at 3:07 pm[...] Labs TechiPedia Digg Toolbox Share [...]
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I'm too late - thougth about creating a new cool digg visualization - see it already at digg contest winners and digg labs » SERPland Says:
December 18th, 2007 at 3:47 am[...] http://www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools/ http://blog.jensfranke.com/2007/04/20/digg-api-visualization-contest/ [...]
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Webマーケティング最前線 » すばらしいヴァイラルコンテンツのための6つのアイデア Says:
February 19th, 2008 at 4:04 pm[...] ユーザーは作業が楽になるものが大好きです。ドメインを探してくれるツールだったり、ネットサーフィンが少し楽になるユーティリティだったり、ツールは必要性から生まれます。DiggのAPIを使ったアプリケーションが私は好きです。なんらかのプログラミングのスキルを持っていれば、Webベースやデスクトップのツールを作れるでしょう。例としてこのようなものがあります。 [...]
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Welcome to metrochannel.in blog » Blog Archive » Digg API goes beyond social bookmarking Says:
April 5th, 2008 at 1:03 am[...] Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API http://www.techipedia.com/2007/digg-api-tools/ by Tamar Weinberg [...]
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» Ultimate Social Media Resource List Utah Search Engine Optimization | SEO Says:
April 6th, 2008 at 10:34 pm[...] 29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API [...]
Tamar Weinberg is a social media enthusiast with a passion for all things tech and productivity. She provides consulting in internet marketing and blogs for numerous online publications, most notably Lifehacker, Search Engine Roundtable, and Mashable.
July 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am
Awesome! Bookmarked. Thanks Tamar for about a month’s work. Off playing with a few of those toys …
July 11th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Enjoy.
July 11th, 2007 at 11:23 am
That’s pretty sweet Tamar. How many of these do you use personally?
July 11th, 2007 at 11:28 am
Depends on what I’m seeking out. On a consistent basis, I use the Smart Digg Button and Digg Alerter. Some are just for fun and games rather than really to be used regularly — but they’re enjoyable.
July 11th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
My, it pays to know the right people! I took up 20% of the list!
Either that, or it’s a sign that I need to go outside more often..
July 11th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I missed out on some like Digg city, thanks
July 11th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Those city visualizations are extremely cool. That domain one is particularly awesome, too, though I agree - it’d be 10x better if they listed all the domains sorted by popularity
Thanks for putting together the list!
July 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
great summary! much more than the api finalists revealed. another experimental contribution to the contest was diggtrees: http://i.document.m05.de/?p=318
July 11th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Hey Tamar, don’t forget my digg comment stalker @ http://diggcomments.headzoo.com, which has been up for nearly a year. Long before the API.. and for most of the time in violation of Digg’s TOS
Now it uses the API though, so it’s all good.
July 11th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Sean: thanks for the heads up. Will definitely go in my next review.
July 11th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
I recently made a version of Digg Mobile (mainly for myself) that can be viewed on a pda/mobile. It shows popular stories in the All, Tech, or World/Business sections (the only ones I read :P) It also has basic functionality to show first 5 comments of any digg story, as to not overload the mobile processor with rendering loads of comments (lol).
Anyway, it can be found here: http://www.mrkryptic.com/diggmobile/
July 11th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
I am also using digg plugin for my site.
July 11th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Very thorough summary, thanks!
I’ve already bookmarked a half dozen.
July 11th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Nice Read….Some of them are really handy!
July 11th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Nice list!
Thanks for the referer.
July 11th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Cadu: I like your program. But make it better.
July 12th, 2007 at 6:35 am
digging digg never gets better with this post. worth a digg.
July 12th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Love it! - Great job Tamar!
(There goes the rest of my day)
July 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Wow, great effort for collecting all these tools writing this list.
Some of them are very useful.
Now, since Stumble Upon is gaining more and more traction, I’m waiting for a similar list for SU
July 13th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Yohay: StumbleUpon needs to release an API, and when they do, you bet I’ll be happy to provide you with a list
July 15th, 2007 at 2:38 am
Wicked awesome list!
July 17th, 2007 at 3:51 am
You rock.
July 19th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Another app:
http://digg.com/software/Digg_revealed
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I’ve been dabbling with the Digg API and it’s pretty good.
So far I’ve built…
http://www.duggornot.com
…which allows users to check how their Digg story submissions are doing.
And…
http://www.duggornot.com/comment_reader.html
… to see how their comments are doing. I plan to integrate them both soon.
They’re still in early development but I’ve learnt a lot about the Digg API in the mean time.
July 23rd, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Paul, cool. Thanks for the info. I’ll be sure to profile it in a later update.
July 30th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Fantastic list. I did something similar for Facebook recently.
Jamie
August 5th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
diggTraitor - Identify the ‘unDiggly Fan’. Based on the Digg API, diggTraitor is windows-based desktop tool to ‘Identify the unDiggly Fans’. It’s a fun tool developed by me, to just explore the digg API and look at a funny side of it. Sort out fans who do not Digg your ‘most vaunted’ stories! Find it here:
http://virtual-view.blogspot.com/2007/08/diggtraitor-identify-fans-not-digging.html
September 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
I’m a loser that doesn’t read old submissions. Thank you for throwing this at me, you listed some incredibly useful tools that I’m already playing with. =) Tamar rocks. End of story.
March 1st, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Wow, great tools here, Some of them like the digg radar are just kind of fun to look at but others might actually provide some small business help. Thanks for the list!