from Hacker News

Digg says it’s serious about building a replacement for Google Reader

by vinnybhaskar on 3/25/13, 3:07 PM with 70 comments

• by mindcrime on 3/25/13, 4:15 PM

  I'm actually sort of rooting for Digg here. Even though "new Digg" has almost nothing to do with "classic Digg," I still feel some nostalgia for the brand, and anybody who will commit to supporting RSS and building a good reader application is worth of some support.

  I think codingthebeach is right to call them a dark horse, but I'm also excited to see what they can deliver.

  That said, one thing that disappoints me about the Digg statement quoted in TFA, is that there's no mention of open standards and/or the Open Web. I'd like to see these guys say "Yes, we will absolutely support the relevant standards you'd expect to find in a reader: RSS, Atom, OPML, etc." If they do support any "social" features they should consider exposing social graph info using FOAF, and using SIOC would be a nice thing as well.

• by greenmountin on 3/25/13, 3:54 PM

  1) This article has no new information

  2) The linked "Follow Our Progress" form is for email updates

  3) Their tumblr blog has no rss link

  That's not what I call serious. I use their site all the time, but it's no substitute for GR, and I don't want their curation to overpower my feeds. Reader was all about the RSS. At this rate they are sounding like a tardy Prismatic.

• by codingthebeach on 3/25/13, 4:10 PM

  Yay. I would really like to see Digg take a swing at this and said as much a couple weeks ago.

  http://www.codingthewheel.com/internet/could-digg-replace-go...

  Digg is the dark horse in this race. It will be interesting to see how well they can execute.

• by jlarocco on 3/25/13, 5:47 PM

  Can somebody explain the appeal of Google Reader and why people are making such a big deal of it shutting down? I've tried it a few times, and I just don't see the appeal.

  RSS readers are a dime a dozen, and Google Reader is mediocre, at best. The interface isn't great, it's tied to a Google+/GMail account, and there's no way to subscribe to RSS feeds on an internal network.

  I feel like I must be missing something.

• by nothxbro on 3/25/13, 3:54 PM

  It just goes to show how much of a failure what they were currently doing was. The fact they were willing to switch to this shows quite a bit.

  They genuinely should have just let digg be and get costs way down. The ad income would have been substantial if they just left it alone. Digg stories ranked high in search and I imagine they would have continued to do so.

• by ChuckMcM on 3/25/13, 3:53 PM

  Interesting, if you could pair it with a blogging service and hook up an ad service provider there is a business model in there.

• by ck2 on 3/25/13, 5:18 PM

  If you are talking about it instead of already announcing it - isn't it technically too late?

• by muglug on 3/25/13, 4:11 PM

  Um, there are a ton of Google Reader replacements out there doing incredibly well in the wake of that announcement. Digg deciding to create their own product from scratch seems very stupid.

• by amix on 3/25/13, 5:32 PM

  I think this is a bad decision as the market has moved to other things. And others such as Feedly or NewsBlur already serve this niche well.

  For the record I haven't used Google Reader for years (and I have over 500 feeds in it as I used it a lot at some point). Why? Because I find my news elsewhere (on Hacker News, Twitter, Google Plus, /r/python, reddit/r/programming etc.) - - And not to say the awesome mobile services such as Flipboard or Prismatic. I guess RSS usage is even worse for the mainstream and non-technical users.

• by slg on 3/25/13, 3:57 PM

  I have one question I want to propose to the gluttony of companies rushing to replace Google Reader. If it was such a valuable product, why would Google shut it down? I think we are getting too emotional in how we are viewing this market just because a lot of us used Reader. If Google thought there was money to be made with a great RSS reader, they wouldn't have left Reader abandoned for years. If there is a market in which the market leader isn't able to make money, I don't think that I would be rushing into it.

• by wildster on 3/25/13, 3:47 PM

  Yay, another plan for the Digg brand without a source of revenue. If you put too much advertising people will go the next hot thing.

• by gap on 3/25/13, 5:22 PM

  Digg is the company that lost all of my data (saved links and such) and then lied about it. We're slowly bringing the data back online, they replied to my messages 12 months apart. Yeah, I would totally trust them for my feed reading.

• by brokentone on 3/25/13, 4:40 PM

  The Digg folks (betaworks people led by Jake Levine) are the people for the job. They understand surfacing relevant news in a timely way, and they move really fast. Looking forward to this.

• by greenyoda on 3/25/13, 9:28 PM

  It sounds like they want to add specific features to integrate with Hacker News:

  "We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News."[1]

  [1] http://blog.digg.com/post/46251309499/whats-next

• by norswap on 3/25/13, 3:53 PM

  At least, they appear to have their priority straight.

  Keep it simple, we don't need no stinking share buttons. Make it fast - my connection is badly lagging these days and I can't do anything about it short of relocating, so this is close to my heart. Synchronize across device - basically, make mobile apps so that it's fast on mobile too.

• by danielki on 3/25/13, 6:33 PM

  Makes sense. The system for the "new Digg" seems to be heavily based on getting as much signal as possible about the popularity of particular news items among certain groups of users. Why wouldn't they want another signal source, especially given the "news junkie" tendencies of the population most likely to embrace such a service?

• by buf on 3/25/13, 4:42 PM

  I'm excited for Digg. Although I realize that most of the original crew has up and gone to greener pastures (Eventbrite, Sprintly, etc), I think Digg in itself still has the capacity to do great things.

  If they can execute well quickly enough, I can foresee Digg coming out one of the top 5 reader apps soon.

• by chickopozo on 3/25/13, 11:38 PM

  Dear Digg,

  If you use the work social whilst creating a RSS reader you have already failed.

  Sincerely, People who actually used Google Reader

  P.S. A point-and-click html scraper to rss would be nice too.

• by da_n on 3/25/13, 6:39 PM

  I would happily use a Digg/News.me RSS Reader and I think they could pull it off, however for me to take it seriously it must include this:

      Settings -> Export Feeds

• by niggler on 3/25/13, 3:33 PM

  Is there enough value in the Digg brand to justify using it here?

• by PleasePlease on 3/25/13, 3:24 PM

  That could Save Digg. Good Move if they'd succeed!

• by homakov on 3/25/13, 4:47 PM

  I thought digg is dead. Now they have a good idea

• by kristofferR on 3/25/13, 5:35 PM

  Slightly ironic considering how so much of the demise of Digg was a result of their tight integration of RSS in digg v.4.

• by rjvir on 3/25/13, 6:22 PM

  This is interesting since Digg was an instrumental piece in the disruption of Google Reader.

• by leed25d on 3/25/13, 3:41 PM

  A Digg reader, done right, might just begin to put them in a lot of people's good graces.

• by johnward on 3/26/13, 1:48 AM

  Nobody cares. There are already good rss readers out there.

• by rhizome on 3/25/13, 5:57 PM

  That's great, gals and guys. Let us know how it turns out when you're finished.

• by mikro2nd on 3/25/13, 4:09 PM

  Digg who?

• by ttrreeww on 3/25/13, 9:15 PM

  The Old Reader is okay for now, but it's slow.