Digg Brings Back "Who Dugg This?" and Retires Legacy Design

Digg, the struggling social new site, pushed out a number of interesting updates today that bring a few new features to the site, but – most importantly – also reintroduced a feature that went missing when Digg launched its ill-fated V4 update a few months ago. Starting today, users will once again be able to see who of their friends dugg a story. In addition, the company is introducing a new algorithm for generating a more interesting personalized news feeds on the site and a top comments module on the homepage that highlights the best comments from the previous day. Today’s update also brings a new design of the site’s people search engine. Digg also announced that it’s making its new two-column design mandatory for all users and will retire its old design. At this point, the old design was only being used by 3% of its users.

The improved algorithm for the “My News” sections will make this feature more interesting for users who only follow a few other users and those who follow a very large number of other Diggers. According to Digg’s Will Larson “if there is not much recent activity in your My News, Trending blends in the most active content (diggs, comments and clicks over a period of time) from Top News to make sure you have something interesting to read. If there is lots of recent activity in your My News, it will bring the most active stories to the top, making it easier to see the stories your friends are most interested in.”

Still a Lot of Ground to Make Up

The earliest comments show that Digg’s users are quite happy to get the ability to see who dugg a story back, but the general lack of comments (and diggs) on the announcement post – which in the days before the V4 launch would have hundreds of comments by now – shows that Digg still has a lot of ground to make up if it wants the site to return to its glory days again.