digg

Rose Digging in, Adelson out

Jay Adelson, Digg CEO, announced in a Digg blog post that he will be stepping down to pursue new entrepreneurial efforts elsewhere. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose will be the new chair and CEO, though the role-changing date was not disclosed.

Adelson said a new Digg is getting ready to launch, Digg ads are doing well, and the company is hiring.

“The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some new business ideas over the next twelve months,” Adelson posted.  As the economy exits a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new companies to develop. Of course, I will continue to serve as an adviser to Digg.”

In an interview with MediaWeek, Rose confirmed a major push into Digg mobile, including IPhone and Android apps. No mention of IPad.

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Google exec leaving for newly-created Digg role

Digg has lured six-year Google executive Keval Desai away from his directorship of product management to take the newly-created job of VP of product at Digg, TechCrunch has just reported. Oversight of Digg product development has been shared by various Digg executives over the years, and now with the content-sharing site hard at work on a site revamp, a permanent product head was needed. Desai’s hiring follows the hiring of three other key executives including new head designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff, in charge of the new Digg site.

“I’ve known Desai for a decade,” wrote TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. “We first worked together at Achex, a startup I cofounded in 1999 and that we sold in 2001. He is an intense, intelligent and highly capable executive. He’ll be a great fit at Digg.”

TechCrunch guesstimates $15 million Digg revenue for 2009.

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Friends for a fee

Step right up, buy a few friends or fans at the low low price of 20 cents. Or buy in bulk and get 5000 buds for only 13 cents apiece. This is the offer of uSocial.net of Brisbane, Australia.

Leon Hill, its founder, came up with the idea after getting booted out of Digg for an appalling venture. On Digg.com USocial was asking just under $100 to vote 100 times for a client’s chosen story. If a client wanted 1000 votes they paid $700. Though Hill’s claim for dropping out of Digg “site” a few months later was more clients than he could handle, the more likely scenario is as Digg claimed: They ordered him to stop.

Now USocial faces the same restraint from Facebook executives. While Hill told Associated Press that the USocial practice of manually logging in to a client’s profile or creating one,  and seeking out people who are a good fit for the client’s products or services without saying it’s not the client is not violating any Facebook terms of service, Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt disagreed.  ”Buying and selling of actions that are supposed to be taken by a user are certainly, we would argue, not authentic,” he told AP.  Now Facebook is saying that anyone caught sharing her or his password with a third party could have her account shut down.

While USocial’s Digg practice of selling votes was unethical, we’re not sure who is acting the least appropriately in this “Friends and Fans Fiasco” – Facebook or USocial. This could simply be seen as hiring a contractor to handle your profile, just as book have ghostwriters, for example. Do OnStar’s outsourcers answer the phone “OnStar” or “Sitel, outsourcer for OnStar?” And do we care?

Facebook has little right to say with whom you can share your password. Just as with the recent high-handed LinkedIn “limit your connections to 30,000″ decision, one must wonder if Facebook is considering its profilers or its wallet.

 

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 Digging for dollars

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Digging it just got easier

Jen Burton, senior community manager for Digg,  recently introduced an e-mail alert feature via the Digg Blog. Here’s what he said:

“You know those amazingly witty comment replies you always post on Digg? Does it sometimes seem as if the original commenter didn’t see them? Based on your feedback, we’re releasing a small feature that will send an email to that original commenter – now you’ll know for sure if they’re ignoring you. We’re hoping this new feature will foster even more communication and sharing within the Digg community.”

Now Digg has yet another product, an API that makes Digging a news article more tantalizing – and easier – for a publisher, even via mobile. While Digg isn’t talking about it so far, we discovered the news via Google Groups and VentureBeat.

“The API will allow other Web sites or applications to submit new entries for Digg and will undoubtedly encourage software developers to enable their sites and apps to publish links to interesting URLs on Digg automatically, rather than requiring a human user to click through the steps currently required to submit an item,” reported VentureBeat. 

While we don’t know as yet, the API might make it possible for visitors to submit an article to Digg, or vote for one already submitted, without having to leave the site they’re currently visiting. More on this as we “digg” up the details for our clients.

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