14 DAY TRIAL // Google may be abandoning Reader users and the market as a whole, but there are others picking up the slack. Feedly has positioned itself as a replacement, quite well actually after the last few updates, all of which focus on making the web-based Feedly more like Reader.
But Digg has promised to build a news reader as well and to have it ready, at least in early form, by the time Reader is killed, on July 1.
It's a tall order, but Digg is already working on it. But it won't be able to build everything from the get go, to know what to focus on, it asked the people who had signed up to be notified when the Digg Reader would be available some questions about how they use Reader and what they want in the app.
Out of the 17,000 or so people that Digg sent the questions to, some 8,000 answered. And it's clear from the answer that they're all power users. 80 percent of them said they checked Reader several times a day. Almost all check it at least once a day.
What's more, some 40 percent have more than 100 feeds in Reader. Most users also rely on Reader for both work and at home.
Digg has learned a few lessons out of this. For one, it knows that it's dealing with power users, so it will have to have the infrastructure to deal with heavy usage in place from the get go.
Digg also found that most users just want a simple news reader, something to get the job done. Search for example, was only used sometimes by most users and never by about a quarter.
Since a search engine is a heavy investment, Digg won't focus on it for now but rather work on the things that most people use all the time.