Ben's Blog World: Screenshot tour: a first look at the new Digg V4 alpha -- smarter, faster, more personalized

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Screenshot tour: a first look at the new Digg V4 alpha -- smarter, faster, more personalized

I just woke up to find a shiny new Digg 'V4' alpha invite in my email inbox. Squealing with delight I hurried to the new website (you can register your interest there, if you haven't already) and begun the 'upgrade' process.

First, it's just like frickin' Twitter. Seriously, the first step, after logging in, is choosing a bunch of Digg accounts to follow. The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, Kotaku -- and so on.

There are a few more screenshots after the break

You then have the choice of linking your Twitter, Facebook and Google accounts to Digg. Twitter and Facebook weren't working when I tried, but from what I can tell it just auto-follows anyone that uses both Digg and one of the other services. Maybe it also outputs your recent Diggs to your Facebook and Twitter streams? And BUZZ?!

Once that's done, you're shown the main new feature of Digg V4: My News. Based on who you follow, a personalised News Feed (...) will be generated for you. It's basically the old Top News page, but it only displays stuff that your friends (or 'liked' corporate accounts) have Dugg.

Other than 'My News', not a lot has functionally changed. As you can see, it's now easier to submit a new link -- you can do it from almost anywhere -- and the whole site is snappy and 'AJAXified'. It feels a lot more responsive than the current Digg, but that might just be because so few people are using it.

It's obvious that Digg wants to become your homepage, or portal. If you choose to follow news sources, My News could easily become your go-to site to find all of the latest and most interesting news. It feels a lot like Twitter, but with built-in moderation.

Of course, Facebook's new Open Graph Search is basically the same thing... but still!