Digg, News Media | featured news

News.me, the social news service incubated at betaworks, announced today that it’s officially shutting down its iOS apps and removing them from the App Store. The company is also claiming that it’s yet another victim of Twitter’s latest API guidelines, and states that Twitter may have even viewed its service as a competitor. We might not go that far, but it makes for a good story.

Digg rose to prominence years ago by changing the way people share news online. But its subsequent downfall – and $500,000 sale to Betaworks on Thursday – underscores the swift evolution of technology that is helping people discover content online.

When it comes to releasing a new product, users and pundits’ opinions only count for so much, but numbers — including revenue and traffic– don’t lie... This week, the web analysts at Hitwise gathered data showing a 34% decline in visitors in the U.K. and a 24% decline in the U.S. in the past 11 weeks.

With the release of the new Digg on August 25th, anybody with the ability to understand how a story, which is promoted to the popular section, is composed, has an edge in attaining viral exposure ranging from tens of thousands to millions of pageviews. Diggs users constitute a large proportion of bloggers. Thus stories promoted to their popular section, which was previously their homepage and now the Top News page, can attain anywhere from less than 10 to hundreds of links pointing to their websites.

The brand new Digg is under fire on its first ever Monday from both its most loyal users and the competition at Reddit. Launched last Wednesday, Digg power users have launched a Digg Revolt today, some calling it "Quit Digg Day," and the Reddit community has embraced the feud.

Within the past three weeks, Digg.com has allowed some of their most loyal users to sign up and try out Digg version 4 . It has been speculated that they will be doing a full roll out of the new site sometime within the next two months.

Rose went on to give a pretty detailed overview of his experiences so far . The role seems to be taking its toll, the words “nightmare” and “stressed” cropped up a couple of times but he does also say it “feels really good.”

At the “Bigg Digg Shindigg” event at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSWi), Digg CEO Jay Adelson revealed that the popular social bookmarking site is getting a major overhaul, teasing the audience about new features such as personalized feeds and the return of the Digg leaderboard.

Digg founder Kevin Rose dropped a morsel of information about a major overhaul to the social news website that's been a long time coming...Instead of limiting the pool to input from its own users, Rose indicated that Digg may also begin taking into account link-sharing data from other social networks.