For three straight days in early August, unintentional gay porn innuendos of Olympic men’s swimming reigned supreme in traffic on Buzzfeed, the breakout curated newsite of viral content.
Buzzfeed’s closest competitors, Reddit and the newly relaunched Digg, each featured dramatically different stories, from the Syrian rebellion to video game history (and, of course, plenty of cats).
Today marks a new start for Digg.
Just six short weeks ago, Digg was bought by Betaworks and it immediately launched aggressive plans to relaunch the site in six weeks. And we will admit, we are impressed with the new site and app.
The social bookmarking site has a new lease on life, and it is apparent that the foundations for both new products reflect simplicity and ease of use.
In addition to a new website, Digg has a brand new iPhone app.
We were thoroughly impressed and can't wait to start using the site again.
Betaworks, the company that acquired the remaining parts of Digg.com, says it will have a brand-new version of the social-news site up and running in less than two weeks.
In a blog post today, the 10-person team offered a brief primer on its plans to rebuild the site, as well as more detail on why Betaworks purchased Digg in the first place.
"We acquired Digg because we all need a product to help [us] find, read, and understand what the Internet is talking about right now," the company wrote, adding that Digg once "represented the messiness of the Internet at its best."
Betaworks, a New York technology development firm that has had its eyes set on news distribution for some time, has purchased former social new powerhouse Digg.com for $500,000, sources close to the matter told the Wall Street Journal. Betaworks founder John Borthwick will be the new CEO of Digg.
“I’ve always been a fan of John’s product vision and the companies he builds, funds, and advises,” said Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg. “John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can’t wait to see what he does with Digg.”
Digg’s January saw an increase in page views by 35% and was its highest traffic month since October 2010. When it dug into why, it found we’re proud to look smart, hip, or funny by sharing tech news and offbeat content, but we keep our guilty pleasure entertainment and divisive political reading to ourselves.
