People said it could happen but it many of us are surprised it did happen. This includes Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, who tweeted to say he wasn’t aware of the change.
So; what did happen?
Digg launched their URL shortener into a storm of controversy. Rather than simply redirecting users on to their final destination (like most URL shorteners) the digg version put a framed DiggBar at the top.
The goal of this DiggBar was simple; users could digg the submission while reading it or engage various other of Digg’s offerings.
The problem; people don’t like the fact that the URLs pointed to digg.com and not the intended site. In order to show the toolbar Digg had to keep users on the digg.com domain.
It took about a week for Digg to cave in. They didn’t cave all the way; they found a promise. Users who were logged into Digg and who clicked on the short URL would see the DiggBar whereas users who were not logged into Digg would redirect all the way through and land on the original article. It seemed to be working.
What happened late last week was a radical change in this behaviour. Rather than redirecting anyone through to the original article or even showing the original article wrapped up in a digg frame the short URLs started to redirect people to the digg.com page for the story. Just to be clear; the URL shortener no longer pointed to the URL that people intended the URL to point too.
Digg didn’t tell anyone about this change. They just did it.
This will be concerned a mighty own goal. People are already talking about how services like Bit.ly are acutely aware of which URLs are passing through the system and how many clicks those links are generating.
Bit.ly could quite easily become a very serious competitor to Digg by simply presenting this information to the public. Look at tweetmeme for an example. Looks like Digg? It’s powered by retweets.
Kristin Marshall has a transcript of Kevin Rose talking on twit.tv which is worth a read. She asks a good question;
My question is this: If they intended on doing this to Diggbar, why was there no post on it, no indication on their intentions to change Diggbar from a general URL shortening service to one that is exclusively for Digg articles? I’m not debating the usefulness of an exclusive Digg shortener, in fact, it can be very useful if that’s what you’re aiming for. On the contrary, I’m questioning how Digg went about all of this. It makes them look shady.
The Time Thief at One Cool Site also makes a good point
What’s more? The fact that I now have to click at least twice and in some cases three times, to get the real link is so annoying that I turn the dang things of. So unless or until someone penetrates my thick skull and convinces me that to having the urls to my blog posts redirected to social network landing pages benefits my blog and creates no security risks, I’m remain unimpressed.
July 20, 2009
Connections