Well after the creaking and straining, Digg v3, is now up and live and appears to be coping with the early rush.
(5:00AM PST): Digg temporarily down while we switch over to Digg v3.0.
(6:10AM PST): Digg v3 is live.
(6:20AM PST): Demand is so high we’re adding more machines.
(7:50AM PST): We are making a run to bestbuy to pick up some more servers (kidding). Seriously though: We are seeing much higher activity than we normally do, so bear with us as we turn on additional machines and tweak the site throughout the day.
While not quite as much a revolution in the design as v2, v3 certainly benefits from the expansion of various different topics such as ‘Science’, ‘Entertainment’ and ‘World & Business’. Adding the ability to sort the stories based on popularity such as top stories this year also expands the feature set.
With sites like Newsvine and Netscape building on Digg’s features and I feel like Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and the team behind Digg are realising the potential threat of competition that increases each day.
Though topic expansion has no doubt been on the cards for a while, Digg has begun grow its service no doubt feeling sure that they have the basic site refined enough to cope with the growth into other subject areas. Naturally as the success of Digg increases so the attraction and financial benefit of rigging the system will increase proportionally. On the back of VC funding back in October, no doubt much of the work has gone on the backend, putting the infrastructure in place to cope with the growing click fraud Digg appears to have been suffering from. With all that at stake lets hope that in the time they have taken to expand into these areas they have done everything they can to minimise the possible effect this may have on genuine news articles. Good luck guys.
God save the DIGG, and his huge traffic