What Digg Did Wrong

A couple of months ago I wrote a post asking if social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious were dying. It looks like they are. This week the tech press revealed that Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, is abandoning ship and moving on to a new startup. Traffic is also down by almost 50% compared to its peak, so tech blogs are declaring Digg pretty much dead.

But what happened exactly to Digg, and what mistakes did it do, as it once was one of the most popular and respected Web 2.0 startups? In fact at one point Google was intended to buy it for around $200 million, but the deal fell apart in the last minute.

If you want to understand the whole thing there is a very interesting article at Computer World titled Why Digg Failed. Here is a quotation:

Digg content categories were crazy.

Digg is about content, and content needs to be categorized. For most of its existence, Digg categorization was bizarre and heavily biased according to the founder’s semi-adolescent world view. For example, “Tech” was a category. And so was “Apple.” Why was one company singled out for special treatment? There were no categories for things like “Religion” or “Research,” but six categories for gaming.

Digg has improved content categories by offering fewer, more general ones. But its “Media type” categories are “News,” “Image” and “Video.” The first isn’t a media type, but a content type. For example, video can be news, Why isn’t it “Text,” instead of “News.” And why shut out “Audio”?

Digg has always struggled with simple categorization.

The article also mentions how Digg had a bias against blog content, and how ended up alienating bloggers from its user base, which certainly hurt its popularity. Worth a read.