In the couple of months I've been using Digg, I've really got used to the service and I love it. However, there's always room for improvement...
Here are 10 features that I feel would make the Digg experience better:
1. Advanced search
Digg's search has the AND operator by default, recognizes phrases, you can search last 7, 30 or 365 days, and that's pretty much it. Where are the advanced options: boolean operators (+, -, OR...) or precise time frame search (for example, search only stories between two dates? Also, if you want to search a particular category, you must click that category (two clicks if it's a subcategory) and then you can search it - it would be much better if you had a central search page with all that options in one place.
2. Organizing your Diggs
Many people use Digg primarily as a bookmarking service. It makes sense: the community diggs the best stories so they come on top, you digg them to remember them. However, there's currently no way to organize the stories you dugg, commented on, or submitted - just a long list of stories which gets pretty unusable if you're a digg veteran and have hundreds of dugg stories. For starters, it would be nice if you could at least sort them by their category.
3. Better user interaction
As far as user interaction goes on Digg, you can add someone to friends, or reply to his/her comment. No way to leave someone a public or private message. You don't even get a note when someone makes you his/her friend - I just discovered I have some new friends and I had no idea about it. One argument against this is that personal messaging might make some users to pester other users to digg their stories. However, it's still a thing to consider - and it has been done on some other services similar to Digg.
4. Spy on a category
This is probably more interesting to veteran diggers who use the Spy option a lot, but still it would a very useful option if you could have the Digg Spy only for a certain category. For example, I only closely follow Technology stories, I would like to be able to spy only on them.
5. More categories
How many times, while submitting a story, were you unable to find the right category? That's because there just ain't enough of them. An Internet category comes to mind; also, some sort of fun/comedy category would be nice (The current Comedy category is only for videos). I'm sure some more improvements could be done in this department, and I don't think new categories are hard to implement.
6. The dupe police
Digg has some basic duplicate protection, meaning that you cannot submit a story whose exact URL was already submitted. However, what is basically a same story usually appears on tens of different sources, which leads to a number of dupes. And this lead to "the dupe police", a much maligned group of users who (not always unjustifedly) swarm the comments and protest: Dupe, DUPE!. Well, Digg itself could do more to protect from dupes. Perhaps an algorithm that compares a story with other similar stories and gives out a percentage number next to the title. Example: This is a story (43% dupe - see other similar stories). Similar stories could also be listed below the story that might be a duplicate, so the users have the choice to see them also and decide which one is the best.
7. Digger map
This is definitely not an essential feature, but it would certainly be fun - a visual, geographical map of Diggers. It would work simple; when someone diggs a story, you can see a dot at his geographical location on the map. Related to this, it would be possible to use this data for various statistical data, so you'd know not only how many diggers dugg a certain story, but also which stories are most dugg in a certain country/continent, etc. (and we all know geeks like me love statistics).
8. Buried stories
In every user profile, you can see which stories were dugg, submitted, or commented on by a user. However, you can't see which stories the user buried. This could help evaluating the credibility of a user - if someone just goes around and buries story like a madman without any reason, he/she's not going to be very popular.
9. Firefox extension
Yes, I know there already are a few Digg-related Firefox extensions out there, most notably Digg This!. However, it would be nice to have a Digg spy extension in your browser, so you could always have an eye on upcoming stories.
10. Themes/skins
Personally, I like the way Digg looks. But themes/skins are always a nice addition, even if it's only a slight change of color. The simplicity of Digg's design practically begs for visual customization.
This is my list, what is yours? I'd like to read ideas from other users, so feel free to comment on this.
24 Comments:
I think #2 is a great idea
December 1, 2006 at 9:46:00 PM GMT+1
I think all of the idea's are great. Well done!
December 1, 2006 at 9:48:00 PM GMT+1
Nice ideas,
I agree with the dupes one - but sometimes dupes are good, 1 story goes without notice, but then redugg it may make it to the frontpage. The initial stages of a digg story are crucial - and social/political issues affect the course of a diggs rise to headlines or its fall to the trashcan.
>7. Digger map
I hope they never do this, because it eats too much memory and load time. It's interesting, but it serves no real point and would be an annoyance!
>8. Buried stories
I initially agreed, but now I realize its a privacy concern. In digg spy it shows when a user buries a story but it doesn't show their name. I don't think it would be good to show this.
>9. Firefox extension
Theirs a bookmarklet already:
javascript:location.href="http://www.digg.com/phase2/" + encodeURI(document.location)
^ something like that
They also need to enable some sort of spam blocking, like stop people from splogging or allowing the same digg item to make it to the headline more then 2 times. I've seen some articles make it over and over and over again on the digg frontpage (the owner of the site is gaming digg).
December 1, 2006 at 9:54:00 PM GMT+1
The #1 thing bothering me!!
Having to scroll up to read the thread when replying to a post!! So annoying! If you could reply below the thread you are replying to, that would be a great improvement!
December 1, 2006 at 10:00:00 PM GMT+1
I really would like it if digg added better search functionality. I very much agree that the digg search engine is lacking.
December 1, 2006 at 10:01:00 PM GMT+1
When I got onto digg at first, I found about a thousand people I agreed with politically, and made them my friends. Bad idea. It slowed down my digg experience to a crawl, to the point where I just had to stop logging in. When I finally wanted to be able to digg and comment again, I started deleting friends. ONE AT A TIME!?!?
Why isn't there a checkbox-based friend system, where you can "select all" friends (like selecting all email messages), and delete them at once, instead of one at a time?
December 1, 2006 at 10:19:00 PM GMT+1
uhm agree with dupe and advanced search feat.
dont agree with digger map and categories.
i think that its useless to dev digger map, and the less category do you have, more solid are your resources. If they spread the diggs through thousands of categorys, it will be a nightmare.
December 1, 2006 at 10:24:00 PM GMT+1
I think there should be a consolidate feature for comments; they should make a program / hire people that will manually merge duplicate stories.
December 1, 2006 at 11:05:00 PM GMT+1
Anonymous said...
I think there should be a consolidate feature for comments; they should make a program / hire people that will manually merge duplicate stories.
December 1, 2006 11:05:00 PM CET
That defeats the purpose of user moderated. It's up to the users to say which stories should be burried. If users REALLY want dupe stories off, instead of posting "DUPE! DUPE!", they should bury it as a duplicate.
December 1, 2006 at 11:55:00 PM GMT+1
[...]Top 10 features Digg doesn't have[...]
December 2, 2006 at 12:08:00 AM GMT+1
Fantastic list. What about this?
It would be to have tags for the submission of stories to make the search feature a little more rich. Not every story posted fits nicely into any given Digg category, so the ability to tag a submission would yield better search results.
December 2, 2006 at 12:21:00 AM GMT+1
Thanks everyone for the comments. Some nice ideas here, too. I like the one about adding tags for submitting stories, it could work. Also, easier managing of your friends would be nice, as "anonymous" said. Keep 'em coming!
December 2, 2006 at 12:24:00 AM GMT+1
I think dupes should be moderated, either by users or by a set of digg staff members. The same stories should be collected into one large story that has links to all of the articles/videos etc submitted by all the users.
This might prevent people from submitting dupes in the first place and trying to "compete" as well as make things more organized.
December 2, 2006 at 12:55:00 AM GMT+1
I think a great feature would be Alternate URL.
Often, stories make it to the frontpage because they are the first ones, and because they are interesting, even though the url they provide is inaccurate. It would be nice to be able to suggest an alternate URL and vote on it so that if the alternate URL is accepted, the link would be direct.
December 2, 2006 at 1:55:00 AM GMT+1
How about having an RSS link that goes strait to the linked page, rather than going though diggs site? I only look at comments if the link doesn't work to find a mirron
December 2, 2006 at 2:32:00 AM GMT+1
I would like to add a feature to the list.
I would like digg to show how many + or - diggs a comment has got on the users comments page of their profile.
If you want to see how much people are agreeing or dissagreeing with what you said you have to go all the way back to the article.
most of these things are common sense ideas that dig really should have had in place for a long time. I think their coders are lazy. They see digg getting visitors so try not so hard to improve it.
December 2, 2006 at 3:28:00 AM GMT+1
Very well said, the 1 and5 points are my most wanted. Good writeup!
December 2, 2006 at 11:36:00 AM GMT+1
Anonymous said...
No. 11 = Put an option to filter
There needs to be filters that can be saved to your user account.
December 2, 2006 at 3:09:00 PM GMT+1
Import contacts from Gmail, etc for easier story forwarding - like YouTube.
December 2, 2006 at 4:25:00 PM GMT+1
Would definitely be nice to customize the colour scheme. Here's a mock up of how it would look in black..
http://howgoodisthis.wordpress.com/2006/11/24/diggcom-looks-better-in-black/
December 2, 2006 at 8:41:00 PM GMT+1
#9 would be very easy to do.
All you do is get data from
http://digg.com/spy_update?showtop=2&showitems=1&showdiggs=1&showburies=1&showcomments=1&showtop=2&maxitems=5
There you go.
December 2, 2006 at 9:47:00 PM GMT+1
I would like to see the buried feature: "This is old" again.
Whatever happened to it?
December 2, 2006 at 9:50:00 PM GMT+1
@Jim: yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I like my sites pitch black, too.
December 2, 2006 at 11:01:00 PM GMT+1
Many of these ideas are implemented over at http://www.crispynews.com
You may want to check those out if you are looking for these features.
December 3, 2006 at 9:16:00 AM GMT+1
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