Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, shared his insight on how he built Digg and lessons he's taken from that experience:
- Everything on Digg is an RSS feed -- let users get the info they want
- Launched Digg via a blog.
- Found the right audience (personal passion about tech news)
- Highlights users
- Started w/ very limited features -- add them in one at a time to make sure people understand how to use them.
- All features that go into Digg are a tool for self expression! Stay away from "me too" features. In Digg's case, they don't offer tagging.
- Make it simple; make it rewarding - activities should be one click (e.g. digg, bury, #1).
- Know that you users in a social networking app want to deal with the good and the bad. Give them tools to "destroy the garbage" (in Digg's case, the "bury" function).
- Experiment! labs.digg.com
- Allows users a new way to discover news stories
- Give developers time to work on new things
- 500K regular users, 1M daily unique visitors, 10M pages per day
- Scaling - read "Inside LiveJournal's Backend" [pdf]
- Anonymous vs associated comments ... a bit of self editing happens on Digg b/c users have their names associated with a story. Friends see what they digg.
- Digg is in the process of creating an API where you can digg directly from a site. Also in the process of creating something where users can manage their own data (e.g. comments) as well as export their attention data for their own use.
You can also check out Digg's blog.
Side note .. the stuff from Digg labs is some really cool shit! They work with an interaction design firm in San Francisco called Stamen. The two tools: Swarm & Stack allow really interesting visualisation of the traffic that is coming into Digg, how people are digging stories, and relationships between people. Amazing. And mesmerizing!
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