A couple of days ago, Digg rolled out its new profile page on Digg. There are heaps of differences and everything has changed in a way that you can get a little confused when you first use it but quickly find your way around. The main goal to this is to make the site more social and not just a bookmarking/news finding site. Now let me talk about the new profiles as well as give my opinion on them.

As soon as you enter a person profile page, the changes become apparent. First off, up the top we see the 3 newest favoured stories from the user followed about ten of the users most recent activity, including stories dugg, commented on, submitted and even new friends added and shouts. Under that is the last ten shouts you have received. Down the right hand side is a little about section which includes a space for your bio as well as links to your other internet services, photos, friends, and the usual statistics about your digging habits.

The new profile page is really nice looking and smooth. Having more than just the most recent stories you have dugg and one favourite is really what your profile page should have had from the start. It is also nice to see all the types of activity that a person has recently done on the site, it really shows that there is more to Digg than just digging the stories. Shouts are not a feature I think is that great. It is very similar to Pownce, I wonder why. This feature is a little unneeded in my opinion and if they really wanted to do this, they probably could have integrated it with their Pownce service instead of making it individual to Digg. I don’t use the feature because I don’t see any reason to, it doesn’t add anything and is really not worth using.

Being able to see a little About section about a user is good. It gives you a little background information on who the person is and a little bit about their life outside of Digg. Links to peoples Pownce, Facebook, Flickr, Blog or whatever else they have signed up to is nice. It may be a bit creepy if you have a stalker but otherwise it is a nice feature so you are able to follow your fellow Diggers around other services, not only Digg. They also have the ability to upload pictures to the site for other people to see. This is another useful feature which I think should have been cut. They could have found a way to integrate with a popular service, like Flickr, that everyone already uses instead of making a cheap one themselves. It is also great to be able to see a few of the users friends on this page too.

The profile statistics are really interesting. They have added on the page a space where you can see the most dugg topics the person has dugg in the past 30 days. This is cool because it allows you to see which section and which types of stories the user likes to digg and can help with finding new friends on digg with similar tastes to your digging. It still has the same stats from the old profile page with total stories dugg, commented, submitted, the percentage of your stories that make the front page, friends referred and the number of profile views (that number should start to rise with it being more social and profiles more appealing to look at.)

With the profile pages done up, they haven’t gotten rid of your history page, as well as your friends history page. They are still there but the big difference is that there are now useful filters. You can now filter down to the thing you are looking for, whether it is stories dugg, submitted or even comments and shouts. These filters are on both of these pages and make it much easier to filter through the content. You can always view all activity if that is what you prefer.

With these new features, I have been noticing more people adding friends, including people adding me. They have email notifications for activities you select which has allowed me to follow who is adding me as a friend. It seems now that it is so easy to do and follow people, it is becoming more social and randoms are adding randoms, just like of other social networking sites. I personally won’t be adding randoms because I plan on using the site for what it was primarily set for, news and articles. I am only friending my friends and the few people that digg similar stores as I would.

I think it is nice that they are taking a step into trying to make the site more social but I personally could do without it. I think that they should be concentrating on the news side of things and strengthen there instead of moving in a different are, one which is being done so much that they can really succeed or grow because of it. I am going to stick to doing what I do best, digging, and they should do that too!

Yesterday I managed to make the frontpage of Digg. This is a difficult thing to do in my opinion, although there are people that are naturals and get heaps of stories on the frontpage daily. Anyway, I strategically got a story that was bound to make it to the frontpage to get there before someone else submitted it.

First off, I needed to work out what the reader wanted to see and/or know and find a place that would be able to provide that information. I decided to go with the big topic of Apple’s new iPods, one that is seen on Digg at least 5 times a day. I was going to submit one of those stories!

One thing that hadn’t been done is the dissection of the new iPod Touch. Okay, it may seem like nothing but one question that is on a lot of people’s minds is Bluetooth, is it or is it not in the iPod Touch? The only way this could possibly be answered if in one of two ways, either Apple confirms it, or someone rips apart a unit and discovers a chip for Bluetooth.

I knew where I had to go to find the story. iFixit had recently taken apart the iPod Nano and iPod Classic and I was positive that they were going to do the same to the iPod Touch when they got their dirty hands on it. I frantically waited for signs of them having their way with her, refreshing the page every minute. The iPod was out and they had to have one by now.

After about an hour of refreshing, in fine print down the side of the page was the first sign on life “Check out our first look at the iPod Touch.” I click and saw a bunch of unboxing pictures. When are they going to rip into her? Are they going to? There was no mention on the site about taking it apart, but they had to! I refreshed a couple of times. I went to submit it to Digg, entering in all of the field waiting to submit it. I went back to iFixit. After more minutes of refreshing, finally there as a sign, they were going to take a look inside.

This was when I finally submitted it. I was hoping no one else had submitted it during my period of hesitation. To my luck, I was the only one. My story is bound to be on the frontpage by the time they finished stripping her naked. I get Peppery to digg it, he did as well as twittered it. I submitted it to Pownce, thats where a lot of the Kevin Rose Fanboys… errmm… I mean Diggers hang out.

Every 10 minutes, a picture of the iPod Touch went up, each one more less article of clothing from the last. After two hours, she was completely stripped of her glory and out there for the world to see her bits, every single component, every single chip. Every hour, I got one or two diggs. 6 hours later, my story only has 20 diggs. The problem was the timezone conflicts. I was going to have to wait till the morning to see the progress of my story. I went to sleep. In the morning, I wake up to discover my story hit the frontpage an hour ago. 400 diggs by the time I wake up. Yay! I got there! I win!!!

About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.

Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.

I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.

I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.

I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p

There are a few new features on Pownce. I don’t use Pownce much but I do read what people post on it. I generally don’t see any compelling reason to use these micro-blogging services. People use them for short messaging a wide amount of people but that is not something I have any reason to do, let alone have anything to say, therefore these services are somewhat useless to me.

One of the new features on Pownce is the showing of upcoming events on the right side of the page. First off, generally the event don’t have anything to do with me or are of interest. I don’t care about an event happening in America or Canada or any other international country. I don’t live anywhere near there and wouldn’t travel to those countries anytime soon so this new feature is irrelevant to me.

Another new feature was the automatic embedding of Videos and Pictures. In my opinion, this is what services like Tumblr and Soup do. This feature is more for blogging and mini-blogging services and not for the micro-blogging ones. They are moving into a field half way between mini and micro blogging by taking the best of both worlds and merging them together but not focusing greatly on these features to make it a hybrid type service.

The last new feature was linking of other web services. This is somewhat useful because now people can see links to the services I actually use, for example Digg, Flickr and Last.FM. You can also put your IM addresses and links to other websites, for example your personal blog. But this feature is not really original, just taking something that another service uses and taking a different angle.

I would only use these features if I had a way to connect to these site away from my computer. Some services offer this but they generally cost money, money I am not willing to spend on them. I still keep my eyes on the sites, reading what people are up to and interesting things they post. I read what my Pownce contacts have to say on the website and I also still read what people have to say on Twitter via the RSS feed. Am I still a user of these sites, even though I don’t contribute?

Pownce - http://pownce.com/yum9me
Twitter - http://twitter.com/yum9me