I am not sure if you followed the Digg saga, but here’s what happened lately: after the huge decline we all saw one company came out of the woods with an interest to buy the social news site. Called Betaworks, they supposedly paid $500,000 for Digg (remember they were valued at $160 million back in the day…).
Here’s a quote from the article Once a Social Media Star, Digg Sells for $500,000 that appeared on the Wall Street Journal:
Digg confirmed Thursday it sold its brand, website and technology to Betaworks. The price is a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including Facebook investor Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Inc. founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Digg received higher offers from bidders that included technology and publishing companies and start-ups but ultimately decided Betaworks had the best plan for reviving its brand, these people said. In May, Washington Post Co. hired 15 members of Digg’s engineering team—more than half of the company’s overall staff—for its SocialCode digital media subsidiary.
After the purchase Betaworks said they would be rethinking Digg completely, and that a new version, called version 1 or V1, was coming.
Well, that version is out and you can go take a look already (Digg.com). And if you ask me it looks like they want to be the Pinterest of social news.
Sure, the visual model that Pinterest uses gained a lot of attention and got pretty successful, but I am not sure if that is the right one for a) social news and b) Digg’s community.
Time will tell I guess. What do you guys think?
Original Post:
Digg Goes Version Pinterest – I mean Version 1