It’s been promised since a while, but Digg Labs has now launched.
They had connectivity issues following the launch because of the amount of traffic it generated, but they added more servers and everything seems to be running quite fine now.
So far, my favorite of their two tools is the digg Swarm.
Digg Swarm is a more lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers “swarm” around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size — so the bigger the story, the more active it is. As people digg more stories, they move from circle to circle, and increase in size. You might see enormous diggers moving quickly from story to story; those seem to be people digging without taking the time to read stories…
Stories start off placed randomly on the screen, but as they get dugg, their positions change depending on who’s digging them. Stories that are closer together are being dugg by the same users, and you can roll over stories to see these connections. The thicker the line, the more diggers in common that story has — which starts to suggest connections between stories over time. And selecting a story provides more detail about it.
Digg is expected to launch an API later this month, which will tremendously broaden the possibilities offered by the most lively news site around.
July 25th, 2006 | Internet