Digg To Be Rebuilt From the Ground Up By August 1
Betaworks, the new owners of Digg.com and the Digg name have announced plans to “Rethink Digg” with a 10-person engineering, editor and designer team from News.me and they plan to have that process completed and a much improved website up and running by August 1.
Creating a successful website is no easy task, reinventing and launching a once popular brand in six weeks on the other hand seems almost impossible.
Betaworks promises that the new Digg will not simply be a smaller version of News.me, a popular iOS platform, but will instead feature a rich platform with plenty of opportunities for community interaction. The News.me owners have not yet revealed how they plan to change the existing Digg.com website version, although a fresh code base will be used.
Eventually Betaworks will focus on creating a stronger personalized news experience with a combination of Digg and News.me features integrated into a singular platform of some type. The Betaworks team admits that creating a solid integrated platform will take “some time” to complete.
Digg.com was purchased this month for $725,000 by the Betaworks team. In the meantime LinkedIn paid between $3.75 and $4 million for 15 different patents owned by Digg, those patents included one to “click on a button to vote up a story.”
The Digg staff was already depleted having been largely bought out by the Washington Post Company for $12 million in May 2012.
Do you think Betaworks can take a product, start with fresh code and still launch a program that legacy users will use and new visitors will find engaging in just six weeks.
