As many of you know, I took off my Digg hat and put it on the shelf on January 28th after algorithmic changes at Digg made it extremely tough for me to appreciate the social news site that used to give you somewhat of a “high” for getting your stories front-paged.

In the subsequent months, many people did not follow in my lead. In fact, most of them had already left. In the past few weeks, however, even Digg’s other top users are seeing that Digg is becoming more difficult of a social news site to enjoy, and after stepping away from Digg for awhile, I have some thoughts and reflections on how it was and possibly how it should be.

Let me start off by saying that I am still a top Digg user (#42) even though I haven’t submitted in 3 months. As a top Digg submitter, it worked like this: at first, people noticed my heavy community involvement and my participation, and consequently, my submitted stories easily front-paged.

FriendFeed has been out for just a few months and has already established itself as a solid startup with an indefinite amount of potential. Founded by four ex-Googlers, FriendFeed allows you to subscribe to your friends’ updates across 35 social networks and to stay up to date with the content they’re discovering and sharing across the web.

Currently, FriendFeed supports the following social networks and tools:

FriendFeed aggregates social news sites (Digg, Google Reader Shared Items, Mixx, and Reddit), social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared stuff, Ma.gnolia, and StumbleUpon), status updates (Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, and Twitter), video (Seesmic, Vimeo, and YouTube), photos (from Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, and Zoomr), music (from iLike, Last.fm, and Pandora), books (GoodReads and LibraryThing), other miscellaneous web services (Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, your Netflix Queue, Netvibes, SlideShare, Upcoming events, and Yelp), and finally, your own blog or Tumblr. For your blog, any URL will do, and if you are writing for a blog with multiple authors, FriendFeed parses through the authors and only features blog posts written by you.

FriendFeed: The Service and What it Offers

A week ago, I gave a relatively unbiased account of the “Digg revolt,” a response to Kevin Rose’s post that there were to be algorithmic changes to Digg that likely will impact only the top submitters. After seeing how it panned out, I have to say that I’m not impressed.

Here’s a screenshot of a story that became popular with a whopping 235 Diggs. It was taken the night of January 28, 2008 (approximately 11PM EST):

While Digg typically allowed stories to hit the front page within 80-120 votes (the latter being more rare than normal), it’s now requiring almost double the number.

In comparison, here’s another anomaly (for its time). This is a Digg submission from August 17th:

The problem is quite evident that the most dedicated and seasoned users are feeling the brunt of the impact. And so, it’s time that I acknowledge what people have been saying for a long time: I think Digg has jumped the shark.

Here’s why:

Over at the Blog Herald, Chris Garrett says that Twitter is changing his news consumption habits.

How do you get your news? In the past I have variously read newspapers, watched TV news bulletins, read news.bbc.co.uk and obviously more recently sites such as Digg. Now it seems I get most of my news from Twitter.

Twitter: The Upside and the Downside

Three days ago, Heath Ledger passed away. The actor was found dead in his apartment. He was 28. As more and more people discovered the news of the actor’s passing, Twitter was inundated with news links and statements of surprise. If you were using Twitter at that time that his death was announced in media outlets, you knew that Ledger had died. It was impossible to ignore it with the hundreds of Tweets that were filled with emotions over the talented young man’s death.

If you use Twitter regularly, you’d see that it wins as a social news site that provides instantaneous news — at least of that caliber. As Chris Garrett explains in his post, if you follow numerous feed bots, you can get the news all the time. The issue, of course, is engagement. If you’re not actively engaged, the news won’t come at you. It’s like any other news medium. If you’re not watching the television, you’ll find out the news later.

It hasn’t even been a week and my once positive outlook of Digg has come to a sour end. Yesterday, Brian Clark over at Copyblogger wrote that Digg is dead. You know, for awhile, I was giving Digg the benefit of the doubt. When I reported bugs, I got responses. Of course, when it came to the bury brigade, Digg never acknowledged those emails, neither by stating that there was a bury brigade or not. They simply ignored those accusations. Some might say that silence is agreement.

Not long ago, my friend Erik was banned for submitting a story to Digg that Digg construed as a denial of service attempt. However, when he apologized and vowed not to commit the crime again, Digg reinstated his account. He had to make a promise, but once he did, he was back in. The process took no longer than two hours.

A few weeks later, my friend Mike submitted a somewhat NSFW story to Digg. He, too, got banned. He asked Digg about his banning, and they almost immediately responded to him. When he promised not to violate the rules, they reinstated him. Again, the process did not take long at all.