What's New in Digg v1?

Once the most powerful "social" destination on the Web, Digg.com fell somewhat quickly from grace but after its recent sale/acquisition by Betaworks the site is focused on remaking the site and returning it to its former status of one of the best places to find read, and share what's being talked about on the 'Net. The question is whether it's enough.

Visit Digg today and you'll experience a clean, ad-free, image-friendly site which has done away with much (if not all) of the clutter of the former iteration. Digg has removed Newsrooms and the Newsbar (also known as the Diggbar) and reverted back to its original Newswire format which pivots around three "views" including Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming.

What's most interesting is that Digg visitors will see that the voting "walls" have been torn down. In addition to actual diggs by users, Digg scores also now take into account Facebook shares and tweets. That is of particular importance of course and brings into focus the topic of moderation - a contentious issue for many former users.

In the coming months, Digg indicated it will release "network-based" personalization features (as it does in News.me), experiment with new commenting features, continue iterating the site for the mobile Web experience, and launch an API to enable developers to build products.

So, what do you think? Is this version of Digg an improvement over the last? And is it enough to compete (again)?

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