Digg

For the full story, check out our first blog post. We’re a New York-based team of 10 engineers, designers, and editors.

Digg is the best place to find the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now. We live on a website, an iPhone app, and a daily email.

A digg is a thumbs-up — a positive vote — for a story. Any Digg user can digg a story, and every digg helps to inform where that story appears on the Digg homepage and Digg iPhone app.

A Digg Score is the sum of the number of diggs, Facebook shares and tweets for a story. Roll over any Digg Score to see a breakdown of the votes. The new Digg Score that we implemented with this launch is an experiment and a work in progress, but we’re excited to see how this new data can help us identify the stories that our users care the most about.

We learned, while building News.me at betaworks, that finding really great stories requires a mix of smart algorithms, smart networks and, not least, smart people to parse the two. Digg is what the Internet is talking about right now, so our moderators, Dave, Ross and Josh will be watching diggs, Facebook shares, tweets, and a handful of other data to determine where a story should sit on the homepage. Facebook shares and tweets are important signals and will be closely monitored, but we care first and foremost about what Digg users have to say — measured, as always, in diggs.

Comments are a really hard problem to solve, so we’re taking time to make sure we do it right. In the coming weeks and months we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.

Any user of the old Digg can export their data using the Archive tool we built at digg.com/archive.

Right now, you can create an account using either your Facebook or Twitter credentials. If you decide to sign up for Digg with Facebook, all of the stories you digg will be shared to your Facebook Timeline. You can disable Timeline sharing at any time by visiting Settings.

It’s super important to have a robust API for third-party developers. Since we’re starting with a fresh code base it will take us a little time to get it up and running. But we are working on it and we would love hear from any developers about how you would use it.

Yep. We have little time and fewer resources to focus on anything but the user, who is our first, second and third priority. We believe we can accomplish with ten great engineers and designers what other companies do with a hundred and, by keeping our costs low, take our time to find a business model that does not disrupt or detract from the user experience. With that in mind, expect to see some experiments in the next few months.