What's Trending in My News, Who Dugg Your Stories and More
Another couple of weeks, and a another wave of updates to Digg! Last time we released new modules, profile improvements and removed feeds. This time we have
- taught My News how to recognize trends,
- made it easier to see who has Dugg a story,
- launched a module showing the previous day's top comments,
- revamped the Find People page,
- and brought everyone over to new design.
We cordially invite you to join us for screenshots and a brief explanation.
What's Trending in My News
We have thought quite a bit about how to better personalize My News, and are excited to share our first major improvement: we have taught My News a better way of ordering your content.
The two most common concerns about My News were:
- It did not have enough news for Diggers who weren't following many others.
- It did not help filter the river of news for Diggers who followed lots of people.
To help with these we have created a new Trending ordering which is the new default (the existing Recent order remains!).
If there is not much recent activity in your My News, Trending blends in the most active content (diggs, comments and clicks over a period of time) from Top News to make sure you have something interesting to read. If there is lots of recent activity in your My News, it will bring the most active stories to the top, making it easier to see the stories your friends are most interested in.
This is exciting on its own merits but it is more than just a big improvement to My News, it is also an investment in infrastructure. This is going to help make some really exciting improvements to My News in future. Keep watching this space!
Who Dugg This?
Now when you go to a story page (for example this article about an assassination attempt in Mexico or this one about changes to Google's ranking algorithm), it is easy to find out who has dugg a story via either the new Who Dugg This? tab above the comments or the Users Who Dugg This module on the right side of the page.
We hope knowing who dugg a story will help you find more people on Digg who share your taste in news!
Top Comments Module
Lots of interesting comments are written on Digg every day, but it can be a bit challenging to find all of them. We decided to give more exposure to the best comments from the previous day, as well as their authors, and the Top Comments module was born.
This new module is shown on the right side of the page and randomly picks two top comments from the previous day. Right now we are calculating top comments using their comment score, but we plan to experiment with other ways to improve the selection going forward.
Find People Revamped
Digg is more fun with other people. Following Diggers who share your interests makes it easier to scan Top News for stories you'll find interesting (look for your friends' comments and Diggs!) and makes My News come to life.
We have been adding features to make it easier to discover users to follow (like the Top Users module we mentioned in the last blog post) and decided we needed a central place for discovering people. We have updated Find People to make it that place.
If you want more activity in My News or simply to meet a few more Diggers, head on over to Find People.
The New Design is Now The Design
We checked a couple of days ago, and found out that 97% of Diggers are using the new design. That brings a bit of joy to our hearts, and helped us decide to bring everyone forward to the two-column design and for us to decommission the old three-column design.
This does not mean that we are done responding to feedback about the new design! Far from it, we are still grappling with an easier interface for searching, and working on other tweaks, fixes and improvements. If you have any concerns or find any issues, please let us know as we continue cleaning up the design and improving its usability.
Please let us know your feedback! If you have a spare second, you should follow the people at Digg who help deliver these improvements into your hands: Can, Jamie, Mike, Rich and Scott.
You can also give us a shout over on Twitter with your feedback and questions.