Digg was once the epicenter of the social media/Web 2.0 revolution, enabling people to share content with others, comment on hot stories, and find new content. But it’s taken a bit of a hit of late, with Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon all offering alternative ways of doing those same things. Welcome the DiggBar, an effort to once again lead the pack.

The amount of ways we have of sharing content and our thoughts on this content have increased massively in the last couple of years. Twitter is built on the idea, and the recent Facebook redesign also turned the social network into a place for conversation rather than connections to take place. Amongst all this change, many people have abandoned Digg somewhat of late, I being one of them.

Kevin Rose announced DiggBar on the Digg Blog today, along with an introduction video (embedded below) explaining some of the basic features. In essence, the DiggBar takes Digg out of the confines of its homepage and turns it into a toolbar capable of fulfilling many functions.

Submitting stories to Digg has always been a little tiresome. You have to visit the homepage, log in, and then fill out the details. The DiggBar takes the pain away from this process by making Digg fully accessible and functional on any page on the Web.

Now, if you find a story, photo, or video on the Web you think worthy of shouting about, all you need do is either add digg.com/before the existing URL or use the bookmarklet provided. This reloads the page with the DiggBar overlaying the top of the original source. You then have your own Digg toolbar to play around with, all without leaving the site you were originally on.

The options include submitting the page to Digg, or if it has already been submitted seeing the vote count, reading the comments and seeing the traffic coming from Digg. You can also see related stories, or share one with people on Twitter, Facebook, or by email all with the minimum of hassle.

There are two features, which while unoriginal, truly make the DiggBar worthwhile.

Firstly, when you reload the page with the DiggBar overlaid, the URL gets shortened in the same way as TinyURL or bit.ly does. This also happens whenever you visit a story from Digg itself. This makes sharing it on Twitter and Facebook easy and takes away the burden of having to do the URL shortening yourself.

Secondly, in a direct nod to StumbleUpon, there is a Random button which once pressed takes you to a random story from around the Web which has been featured on Digg recently. I spent a good hour on this earlier catching up on stories I had missed.

DiggBar may not be highly original or revolutionary, but what it does do it does extraordinarily well.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 11:57 pm under Internet, Opinion, Social Media.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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