Digg version 4 coming soon

In April 2009, Kevin Rose – Founder of Digg.com spoke of a major update of the site in an attempt to get more users/publishers back on the site sharing their viral content and news stories.

The problem with Digg is that only the top 100 stories or so got font page exposure and high traffic. The rest of the stories did not get all that much traffic therefore publishers were going to Twitter and Facebook where they would get decent sustained traffic in a much easier way.

The new changes mean you will only see the major popular stories and content from people you are following have posted.

Key upgrades:

– All new Digg users will go through an “onboarding process” that asks them to follow friends and publishers.
Users will be asked to import their social graphs from Facebook, Twitter, etc. There’s also a suggested user list for users.

– A users home page will no longer show just top stories by most dugg articles. Now it will show links from people and publishers you follow and this feature is called MyNews.

– Stories that are still very popular will still be shown on a Top News channel.

– If a user diggs a story, all followers of that user will then see it in their feed aswell. This is sort of like a retweet on Twitter. This can create a “chain reaction through the Digg universe,” says Rose, and can drive significant traffic.

– Publishers will be able to automatically publish their content via RSS feeds to Digg. Each story will start off with one Digg.

– The manual process for Digging is also going to be simplified – a user just pastes the URL into Digg and the image, title and summary are automatically generated.

We are waiting for more details as to exactly when the new Digg verion will be live.. More to come..