The Next Web

Digg.com down: new features?

Written on April 7, 2008 – 7:26 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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Digg.com, down for maintenance, or new features?

Last week at the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam Kevin Rose said: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”.

The future might not have been very far ahead of us. Digg.com just went down with the following message: “Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”.

A few other quotes about the new features Kevin talked about:

Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?”

As soon as Digg gets online again we will report it here and let you know if there are new features you can test.

UPDATE: Digg seems to come to live again. You can see the homepage between reloads.

Update II: yes, the account page seems to have been revamped. Not sure if this also includes the options described by Kevin Rose but will test some more. Here is a screenshot of the new page (click for fullscreen) and here is a link to a screenshot of the old one:

UPDATE III: Hmm, the old unknown fatal exception bug you sometimes get while Digging something is still here!

UPDATE IV: Aha, and the comment “There was a problem completing your request. Please reload the page and try again” bug is still alive too!

digg, kevin rose, maintenance, new features, thenextweb2008

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FaceBook launches “profile clean-up” tool

Written on January 11, 2008 – 11:57 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

Business card of Facebook Interaction Designer

Facebook is launching a new Profile clean-up tool that will make it easier to manage and clean-up your Facebook profile. Facebook mentions that ‘users are complaining that their own profiles are cluttered, and they have installed so many applications that it has become overwhelming to un-clutter it’.

That sounds kind of familiar as most of us don’t take time to check any of the requests we get on all those social networks and just once a week click the ‘Accept’ button on everything and everyone who wants our attention. It is easier to ‘Just say yes’ to these things than to actually figure out what they want. This does mean that our profiles are becoming less and less attractive to look at and therefor less useful. It seems that Facebook has come to the realization that less can be more.

The tool won’t actually delete stuff from your profile but “Similar to how your computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons, this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile”. So the clutter will still be there, just hidden behind a “Show my clutter” link.

Lets just hope they also add a ‘Agree to all’ and ‘Delete all “friends” I don’t actually know’ button too.

clutter, facebook, new features, profile

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