For those that don’t know, Digg was recently purchased by a company called Betaworks. The team from News.me is looking to breathe new life into Digg and hopefully help it reclaim some of it’s former glory. Here are my thoughts on the direction they should go.

Digg lost its way when it started caring about what Facebook and Twitter were evolving into. They are for sharing with friends, Digg was for great news stories.

If you show me stories my friends are interested in, guess what? I’m not interested in using your service. I’m really the only one I know in my group that focuses on stories in the Tech space. For instance, I am deeply interested in blog posts about upcoming MySQL developments, but no one on my friend list at FB is.

Reddit makes this so easy and there isn’t a FB or Twitter link to be found on that site. Rather, you are free to subscribe and unsubscribe from user generated communities around specific themes. Look to riff on that model. Algos that look at your Dugg stories and automatically start recommending new communities to follow maybe?

On Reddit, you really need to dig to find interesting subreddits to follow. This process could really be made better by having a sidebar of community recommendations based on something like the keyword density analysis of the 10 most recent stories you upvoted. To the new team, help me find niches that would be almost impossible to find by other means and I’ll love you forever.

I wish the new team the best of luck in their endeavor.