14 DAY TRIAL // Digg, the popular social news aggregator, has recently removed its Shout feature, the only internal sharing tool, in favor of using Twitter and Facebook for recommendations. The company, and many of its users, believed the tool hadn't reached its intended purpose of sharing content between the latter, as it was mostly abused and became the tool of choice for spamming other users. But Digg is now detailing a new communication tool that will, hopefully, fare better than its previous attempt.
While Digg hasn't yet decided how the new system will work, it has several ideas and guidelines for it. The focus will be on conversations, and the tool will provide a more direct way for users to connect rather than promote their links. T
he LA Times quotes Digg CEO Jay Adelson talking about the upcoming feature. "What we want is to give our users the ability to communicate," he said. "What we don't want is to create a system that's easy to abuse." He also added that it would be "a tool that would focus on actual conversations, rather than the mass dumping of links that polluted shouts."
Another way the company plans to avoid some of the problems that plagued Digg Shout is to have the conversations grouped inside certain categories like movies, sports, celebrities, hoping this will allow users who are specialized in certain topics to have a much greater influence on those topics, but a smaller one overall.
There is no clear time line for the availability of the new tool, but Digg has its work cut out in front of it. The problem is that, no matter what Digg does, other than banning the practice of asking for diggs altogether, users are likely to abuse any communication system and it will be interesting to see how or whether Digg will be able to make the new tool better than Shout.