Digg is a social news website. The site's cornerstone function consists of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page. Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems. The website traffic ranked 116th by Alexa.com as of June 21, 2010.
Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. Only Kevin and Ron still play an active role in the management of the site. The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. As Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to the website. In July 2005, the site was updated to "Version 2.0." The new "version" featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by web design company silverorange. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 version 3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged. Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the "dugg" website. This is referred to by some Digg users as the "Digg effect" and by some others as the site being "dugg to death." However, in many cases stories are linked simultaneously on several popular bookmarking sites. In such cases, the impact of the "digg effect" is difficult to isolate and assess. On August 27, 2007, Digg altered its main interface, mostly in the profile area. The domain "digg.com" attracted at least 236 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson explained at the 2010 "Bigg Digg Shindigg," which is part of the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, that Digg is getting a major overhaul and redesign. In an interview with Wired magazine, Adelson explained that "Every single thing has changed" and that "the entire website has been rewritten." Adelson explains that the new Digg will essentially eliminate the duplication problem. It will also help prevent so called 'power users' from dominating the site with their submissions. The new Digg will also offer users a personalized homepage, based on their diggs, that is tailored to their specific interests. The commenting system will be updated to "help fight bad behavior like trolling or group-burying." The entire look of the site will also change. Adelson summed up the new Digg by saying, “We’ve got a new backend, a new infrastructure layer, a new services layer, new machines — everything." John Quinn wrote in a Digg blog post that the company was going to stop using MySQL and begin using Cassandra, a distributed database system. Currently users can sign up to alpha test the new version of Digg.
On April 5, 2010 Kevin Rose announced that he would be assuming the position of CEO as Jay Adelson had stepped down. Although, some time later he has disclosed that he is actively seeking a replacement CEO as the role takes up too much of his time that he would rather spend doing other things, such as angel investing.
