Kevin Rose’s first decision as CEO of Digg has been to dump the controversial Digg bar, less than a day since it was announced that his predecessor Jay Aldeson was leaving the building.
The Digg bar forced links from Digg to be displayed through an iFrame, with the Digg bar sitting on top of every page. When first introduced it caused a storm, although the later option for registered Digg users to opt out did placate a lot of the original drama.
The dodgy thing with sites that use an iFrame bar like this is that it immediately inflates traffic; instead of the page view going to the linked site alone, Digg gets an extra page view on each click thru as well, despite only displaying the bar at the top.
Rose said in a post to the Digg blog that
“Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg”
The change confirms long rumored tension between Rose and Aldeson that first arose last year.
