Friday, February 02, 2007

Top Digger List Gets New Home

After founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg's top user list would henceforth be removed, an enterprising Digger decided to create it himself. By scraping the Digg rank from each user's profile, he was able to reconstruct the top 100 Diggers list.

Why was the list removed in the first place? Typically, hitting the Digg homepage brings upwards of 30,000 hits to a site so Digg has a powerful marketing effect. This has brought in groups that have solicited the top Digg users to submit and vote up paid sites. The gist of it seems to be that the top Digger list made it too easy to get access to the most influential Digg users.

In his lengthy blog post, Rose implied that better social networking tools were in the works to replace the top user list:

Now, as the site has matured and we regularly get 5,000+ content submissions per day, we believe there are better ways to discover new friends based on your interests and what you’re digging. So if you have been digging stories about digital cameras and Oolong tea, you will be introduced to other top users with those interests.

I guess he realizes that as the competition heats up, Digg needs stickier ways to retain its core membership. It's an interesting direction to take the news-driven site in. Unlike sites like the soon-to-be defunct Findory, which recommend new stories to you based on your reading preferences, Digg is looking to recommend friends based on your revealed preferences.