Kevin Rose's WeFollow Quietly Snatched Up by Digg

Earlier in the year Digg founder Kevin Rose launched a pet project dubbed WeFollow, a user-generated Twitter directory of sorts that gained quite a bit of popularity since then even though traffic numbers have dropped off recently. Initially the project was completely unrelated to Digg but it now seems that the site may have actually been acquired by the social news aggregator according to a couple of hints and a source close to the deal.

The idea behind the site is pretty simple, users can add themselves to the directory by sending out a tweet to @WeFollow and adding the tags they think are relevant for their account. Thanks to Kevin Rose’s massive Twitter following the site gained popularity and hundreds of thousands of users added themselves to the directory. The site then breaks down the most popular Twitter users in categories based on their tags. The functionality is not exactly revolutionary but it proved a useful tool.

Interestingly though, Mashable noticed yesterday that the site no longer featured the WeFollow copyright notice but a Digg one leading to the possibility that the site had changed hands sometime recently. The idea got a much more solid base after TechCrunch found from a source that the site had indeed been acquired by Digg, though no money actually changed hands.

Despite the obvious connection between the two sites, the acquisition actually made sense for Digg as it was looking to better position itself in the real-time web market and the WeFollow data could prove very valuable in determining which Twitter users were more authoritative in their respective categories. But, along with the change in ownership of sorts, the site will also get a refreshed ranking system as well as other changes to the way it works. WeFollow won't rank the users solely based on their followers’ count and using the proper tags will have a greater significance as will the tags used by the followers. The revamped site should be going live in a couple of days.