In this publisher preview video above, Digg’s Founder and CEO Kevin Rose explains the upcoming features in version 4. The big change comes from the way the Digg system works. Currently you Digg stories up when you like them, if enough people do that they make it to the front page. That’s an oversimplification but you get the idea. In Digg v4 your homepage will be filled with a Facebook-style feed of what your friends are digging so if you haven’t got many friends on Digg, you better find some. There will be an transition or on-boarding process for existing users where you select people to follow from a suggested user list similar to that of Twitter.
Naturally there’s still going to be the Top News section that does feature the most popular stories Digg-wide, but the focus has certainly shifted to having your friends be the focus for surfacing new and exciting content.
For publishers (like techAU) we’ll have the ability to auto-publish an RSS feed to Digg, removing the hassle for end users to submit stories manually. While we’re on that topic of submissions, if you’ve ever submitted a story to Digg before, you’ll know it’s a fairly lengthy process. In Digg 4. 0 submissions will become a lot easier. Simply submit the link to the content you want to share, choose a thumbnail and category and your done. This simplification is sure to increase the amount of content submitted – smart move Digg.
At the end of the video Kevin says “there’ll be a lot more features we’ll talk about over the coming weeks and months”, so you could assume from that statement that we won’t be seeing the release of 4.0 for quite some time.
via TechCrunch
