Digg is about to roll out a new look version of the site, as it struggles to retain users, that seems to be based heavily on offerings from Twitter and Facebook.

Putting the emphasis on digg users and followers, users will now get a My News homepage that allows you to follow a number of people and see what they are digg-ing rather than having to rely solely on the sites main homepage.

Now blog owners and publishers will be able to publish news via an RSS feed to followers very much in the same way they can with Twitter and Facebook, rather than having to pretend to be an interested reader - something that happens a lot as people try and game the system.

Users themselves will now have their own stream page called "My News" that lets you follow news sources and other digg users to see what they are talking about or reading.

"Because we are links and news you cut out all the other miscellaneous status updates you find on other sites". says Kevin Rose, the company's founder, trying to justify that the new approach isn't just a carbon copy of Twitter with its main status page and followers to influence.

Other features to be introduced include allowing you to see comments made on stories, a leaderboard to show you the hottest stories dugg by your friends, and suggested people to get you started.

The news comes as data from Compete.com suggests that digg has been losing its audience fast over the last couple of months.

"Data from Compete.com shows that after ticking along at about 37m (and as many as 44m) unique visitors for the past year or so, user numbers have fallen off a cliff - from 38m in March to 24.7m in April. That's a 35 per cent drop, and below the 26m it was claiming back in June 2008", reports The Guardian.