Last week we witnessed news that social news and link sharing website, Digg, has been bought for $500 000 dollars by online media company Betaworks. The move comes as a bid to improve the company by joining forces with the News.me service. This merger aims to bring people the current news on email and newsletters, as well as iPad and iPhone devices.
“The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories that the internet is talking about. We are turning Digg back into a startup. Low budget, small team, fast cycles.” Betaworks founder John Borthwick.
Digg started up as the best place to discover the best news on the internet, but it lost it’s way eventually. People began to choose viral services, and there was a shift to Facebook and Twitter, so Digg couldn’t help but be overshadowed. Eventually Digg CEO, Matt Williams had to make a major decision to take things back to the drawing board.
“Over the last few months, we’ve considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place – to discover the best stuff on the web,” Digg CEO Matt Williams.
Was Digg set up to fail?
For a website like Digg failure was inevitable. The best social networking websites have developed so far, so it’s all too easy to get forgotten. We’re in an age where it’s not about making the best social network anymore. What is making a difference to the way we do things is the range of apps being developed to optimise social networks. Not too long ago SlideShare was bought for $119 Million! The value in SlideShare is the way it improves our experience on LinkedIn, and this is what developers should be aiming for.
Williams has made a good decision to go back to the beginning, where it all started. The fact that they are aiming for mobile devices is definitely a good sign. Digg has suffered a lot of losses in it’s time, but we might see it get revived by the new team involved.
