Displaying items by tag: Digg

Digg is officially back online and already it is off to a bad start. The newly reinvented page has decided that instead of using their own login procedure they are going to require people to log in with Facebook. This is probably one of the worst things that Digg could have done. Almost anything would have been preferable to using Facebook for the login path. Digg’s excuse of doing this to limit spam is not going to fly with many people either as there are a number of methods to prevent spam and still allow people to setup their own accounts.

The big news story today is of the purchase of social news sharing site Digg to Betaworks for the small sum of $500,000. The world was shocked at this number considering the massive impact that Digg once had. When they first launched they were THE way to share your content on the internet.  Unfortunately Digg has had a series of bad management decisions as well as facing serious competition from rivals like Reddit, Stumbleupon and others. However, the story behind the $500k price tag might not be complete as new information has come to light about the way the company was sold in parts to different buyers.

On June 11^th something happened across the internet that has reverberated through many online services that we take for granted. Starting with Facebook there was an unexplained (and Facebook still refuses to comment) run of legitimate sites suddenly being marked as spam, then just as suddenly being “fixed”. We saw this with our links where after posting an article on Microsoft we lost all links between June 11^th and May 28^th. When we tried to repost them we were told that the links were blocked because they were “spammy”. Our report of this issue resulted in well over 100 others stating the same thing was happening to them.

Popular news aggregation site Digg appeared to be having some issues today as it stopped being able to service users. The issue started at around 12:00 Eastern time in the US and at the time of this writing the site is still not available. Upon reaching the site users are greeted with a blank page a simple message saying “No stories found”. ***Updated 6-11-2012 14:51 Digg came back online for around 2 minutes and is back down; still no word as to whatr caused the almost three hour outage****
***Updated 6-11-2012 19:45 Digg is back online, but still no word on what happened.***