14 DAY TRIAL // URL shorteners are a very popular business right now, with everyone from unknown startups to established web companies launching their own services. Some are better than others but overall they have pretty much the same functionality. Digg, the popular social link aggregator, has launched its own service, Diggbar, in April, not without its fair share of controversy at the time. Things have quieted down for a while until Digg decided it would be a good move for the links shared with the URL shortener to take users to a Digg.com landing page rather than directly to the story.
When introduced, Diggbar worked pretty much like any other URL shortener service, of which there are plenty, except that, for the users logged into Digg, it added a bar on top of the site, hence the name, showing some stats about the link and allowing users to digg the story. Those who weren't logged in got redirected to the original target, standard behavior for most URL shorteners. Some people were annoyed about the bar and it caused some turmoil at the time but everyone got used to it.
But now, just as many have started using it, Digg has changed this behavior, without any notice, with logged-in users being showed the bar like before while the rest now get redirected to the Digg page with comments on the original link and only then can they get to the proper story. It's easy to understand why the site would do this, as it means more traffic and hopefully bigger revenue. But it's doubtful whether it will last long when it's clear that many will just drop the service and go with one of the tens of competing products that work as they should.
Digg founder Kevin Rose has responded, tweeting that he wasn't aware of the changes as he has been on vacation in the past two weeks. However, he later said that this was part of a new strategy for the product, with Diggbar becoming a URL shortener just for Digg's internal links. Whether this was planned from the start or was a change of plans remains to be seen but it will most likely kill the service as it is now, making Digg, once again, look like it cares much more about traffic than its users.