Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Did Digg Just Committed Social Network Suicide?

People who owns social networking sites are delusional if they don't realize that the most valuable assets are the users. The users are the one bringing a vast amount of content free of charge, and doing so increase the traffic on the sites making it a good prospect for advertisers.

Digg could claim to be the best social networking site for news & politics, up until to day that is. It had 3 features that made the discussions from all across the political spectrum and from all over the world more lively and urgent than anywhere else on the web.

One key feature remains: The front page one. It allows content to go "viral". The two other ones, scrapped by Digg today, were the "shout it " feature and the "Blog it " feature. The 1st one had the great advantage to let you share immediately a story link with your mutual friends, the 2ND one was useful for bloggers to post a link on their own blog.

Active Digg users will have to use other social networking sites (namely Facebook & Twitter) or email to connect with their friends on Digg. It will have the effect to give a serious blow to a burgeoning community.

This absurd business decision only make sense if Digg is in negotiations with either Facebook or Twitter, and one of the condition of the sale deal is for Digg to kill some of its unique features.

What social networking sites should keep in mind in that their only valuable assets are users,nothing more and nothing else.

I would not be surprised if Digg put back the features very soon once traffic on the site go down to a trickle.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"It will have the effect to give a serious blow to a burgeoning community"

Your sentences will have the effect to give a serious blow to retarded middle school students everywhere. How hard is it to construct a sentence? Jesus!

Anonymous said...

My sincere apologies for my outburst above. I've had a bad day and wasn't thinking clearly and didn't do my research. I thought you were likely some high school kid who was out to cause a ruckus and didn't realize you were not a native English speaker. Please forgive me and if you wish, delete my comments. Have a nice evening and you're correct... Digg is headed the wrong direction!

Unknown said...

I don't really care about the Shout feature, and knew that it was going away (there was a digg townhall last week that gave the heads up on that). BUT the 'blog this' feature was my favorite feature. I'm currently emailing support@digg.com about this and spreading your story on friendfeed as well. I really hope they bring back the 'blog this' feature. It is greatly missed!