Digg u-turns on DiggBar features

17 April 2009 13:10 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Digg, the popular social networking news suggestion site, has responded to concerns about its new DiggBar, which it launched earlier in the month, with a u-turn on some of the features it automatically offers users.

In a statement on the company blog and hoping to answer concerns from some sites, Digg has said that it will turn off the DiggBar unless you are logged as a member.

Previously automatically on for all users to the site, Digg claims that 25% of all DiggBar users are discovering new content they otherwise wouldn’t have by viewing related stories and content from the same source.

"While the vast majority of Digg users find the DiggBar valuable (only a very small number of users have disabled the feature or hit close with any frequency) we understand that many folks were confused when opting out", the company said.

However, in an attempt to lure back publishers who have already made moves to stop Digg from parsing pages, the site has also said that its ShortURL service will also be changing.

"All anonymous users, on or off Digg will be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect (301), no toolbar, straight to the site. These changes ensure that content providers receive full search engine ‘juice’ or credit for all links on and off Digg. They also ensure that Digg short URLs won’t appear in the indexes of any major search engines".

Full tags

Software, Online, digg, Social networking