Playing with Digg’s New Digg Trends

On November 4th of this week, Digg announced on their blog a new feature they call, “Digg Trends”. It is a new feature that identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have garnered quite a bit of attention or activity. These stories are tagged based on the amount of activity surrounding them (the number of diggs, the number of buries, or the rate of comments being posted an hour). The story pops up onto the front page of Digg and is displayed for ten minutes so users who have not seen the story can view it. There’s also a cool big timer which is set to ten minutes that is set right beside the link to the story. Each story is given ten minutes of attention on the front page until it gets taken down for the next story.

While I was at work, I miraculously fell upon this new feature. I do not know how they delivered the feature but I think only some people can view the beta while others can not. I do not exactly know but I found the feature cool. Although it does seem kind of annoying to have a big huge timer counting down in front of you, especially if the Digg home page is not the center of your focus while you’re on the computer, It is not noticeable once you just scroll down to the next bunch of stories. It was a good idea to just implement it on only the top part of the home page. I hate it when those ads come up on to the screen and they block half the screen off and when you try to scroll, it follows. That is very annoying. I played around with it for about five minutes before I got disinterested in the story and moved on but the five minutes of using it has allowed me to see something. On the right side of the story, there is a number which states the number of people that have checked out the story. I kept on refreshing the page to see if the clock was working in real time too and what I noticed was that the amount of people that have ‘checked out the story’ kept on changing. The numbers kept on changing at random but within a range of 400-600. I do not know if Digg has fully implemented the functionality of that part of the feature but just looking at the values change every second is very, how do I say it…wrong. That’s misrepresenting the activity of the story. I actually don’t remember what the story was because I did not actually click on it. I think it had to do something with New York and Wall street or somewhere around those lines. The numbers kept on changing and at first I thought that more and more people were actually clicking and viewing the story but the numbers were also decreasing. At first the value was around 700, then it was at 400, then at 500, and then back down again to 400. This pattern kept on going until I just said, “Fuck it, it’s still in beta, they’ll work it out later.” Still though, if this was deliberate, they should have just waited a little longer to get that part of the feature functionally working.