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Digg Dugg its Own Grave

What’s new at Digg? Digg’s upcoming changes revolve around importing your social graph from sites like Facebook, then having a Digg page that shows the stories that were “Dugg” by your friends, the most. Sounds a bit like Facebook’s “Like” and Twitter’s “RT” features doesn’t it?

Before there was Facebook and Twitter, getting on the front page of Digg was every blogger’s dream. However, when your top 100 users control 56% of your homepage content, your upside can only be limited.

While Facebook and Twitter have grown by listening to customers’ needs and adapting,  Digg has already lost an overwhelming 13.8 million unique visits from March to April, 2010 (Compete.com, April, 2010) — a 36% dash. Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, has made several announcements hinting to a Digg revamp soon, but it is yet to be executed.

Nowadays you do not see many sites eminently featuring Digg buttons anymore; those button have long been replaced with the likes of Twitter, Facebook Likes or even Google Buzz – Facebook, Twitter and Google all have the potential to feed you news relevant to your interests, and with far fewer absurd comments.

Digg is hopeful it could regain some market share and reboost its unique daily visitors to what they once were; nonetheless, in an age where everyone is embracing more relative interest-based  sharing, Digg will have a hard time doing so. Will version 4.0 revive Digg? Only time will tell.