Digg Unveils Real-Time Newswire Feed for Customized News Curation

Digg has fallen on bad times following last year's ill received update, but is now launching an interesting new tool which could turn things around, if only because it's the only tool of its kind.

Digg Newswire is a new real-time feed which enables users to view the very latest Digg submissions as well as the very recent ones that are picking up steam.

There are also several filters, such as a minimum and maximum number of diggs, which make the feed very customizable and suitable for a number of purposes.

"While stories arrive on Top News every ten minutes, news appears in the Newswire in real-time: submit an article and it'll immediately be at the top of Recent within Newswire. As the story is Dugg, it’ll move up in the Trending rank within Newswire," Digg's Will Larson explained.

The idea is to make it easier to spot stories before they become popular, offering a more 'instant' view of the stories landing in Digg.

By default, the Newswire page displays stories that are Trending, new stories that have gotten a number of diggs already, digg from power users will weigh more, but also that have been tweeted, liked on Facebook and so on.

However, if you switch to the Recent mode, you'll see all stories as they come in, with a notification indicating that new entries are available, Twitter-style.

There are also ways of filtering the stories that show up, you can pick a category, such as Technology or Science, as well as filter them by their type, text, video and so on.

Finally, a filter that could come in handy for spotting a very specific set of stories, is the maximum and minimum digg counts. For example, to get fresh stories that may become popular, you can set the minimum digg count to 10 and the maximum to 50.

There is also a Newswire activity feed which highlights what everyone is doing in the Newswire, who is digg what, what stories have made it to the Top News section and so on. The added transparency, Digg believes, will help with the relevancy and the quality of the activity.