Last week, Digg implemented new profiles for users. Things all seemed great despite some of the negative feedback. The site became more social, which I believe was ultimately their goal with the new profiles. Randoms started adding me as friends. I decided to leave them as my fans and not make the relationship mutual for the simple reason that I do not give a shit about them or what they digg on the site.

I had the shouts set so anyone could shout to me. The first should I received was from a friend that added me. At the time, I though he was a random like the twenty or so other people who added me but it turns out, it was somebody I knew from the internet. Thanks to the shout feature, I was able to identify him, and add him to my friends list. Now there is a good use for shouts. My friends had also shouted me an article they submitted and that is fine too, I can help them try and get teir story to the front page, like they have done to my stories in the past. Another good thing I like about shouts.

Yesterday, I finally got a piece of the dark side of shouts, abuse. A random added me and then kept sending shouts every ten minutes to everyone talking telling us to digg the story he submitted. First off, I don’t give a shit about randoms, and secondly, I don’t want to Digg nonsense crap that you submit. Also for the record, if you submit 300 stories to Digg and none of them ever reach the front page, you should just give up because no one cares about the shit you find interesting. Leave Digg and go make love to your WoW girlfriend (who is actually a guy.) Anyway, back on topic. This really annoyed me, especially the email notifications of this spam. I needed a way to shut this thing and prevent him from spamming me.

Trying to shut this guy up was an extremely annoying experience, especially since the ways of preventing him, were too affective and I didn’t want that. The only option I had was to only let my friends shout to me. This may sound like a good idea but I don’t think that I should prevent other people from shouting to me because one douche spams me. There should be a way I can block him so I no longer have to take his spam. Anyway, I did that and 12 hours later I put it back so everyone can shout to me. I haven’t had spam since. I don’t want to miss out on long lost online friends because of some idiot, it’s not fair.

It is a shame that one douchebag, whether it is on Digg, another site, or even in real life can ruin something for everyone. What sucks more is that we can’t do anything about it or we are limited to what we can do to prevent it from affecting us. I simple block would be sufficient but we don’t have the option to do that. Please let me block this person, also if you haven’t already, delete him. No one will miss him and its not like he did much for Digg, only ruin it and piss off some of its users.

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!