Announcing The Friendly Digger

Ever since Digg.com under gone its recent set of changes, I had trouble reading the stories of my friends. I used to view my friends’ submissions list, and open any links that I liked in the new windows. After I looked through the links, I used to hit the digg button on the stories that I liked. However I no longer can do that, because the Digg staff decided to remove this convenient button. While I understand that they probably did it to combat diggs that people were giving out to improve their own rank, it still annoys me that I have to have two windows open for every site I want to visit just so I can digg the good stories. More ever this tends to slow down my computer quite a lot, because the design of Digg uses a lot of fancy effects.

The solution that I came up with was to develop a method for surfing my friends’ stories without having to see the unfriedly Digg interface. For the last few days I have been playing around with the Digg API, trying to figure out the best way to implement this. The final product is not complete yet, so I will not go into much details as of now. But I can tell you some of the features that DiggSurf will have:

• Revenue sharing model that will give credit even if you don’t digg the bad stories so you don’t violate the Digg TOS
• Digging using AJAX from the site you are visiting
• Random unvisited story will be shown every time (StumbleUpon style 😉 )

For now you can view my testing ground for all features called the Friendly Digger. Right now it only duplicated the old Digg, there all your friends’ stories will be listed along with the Digg button. As of the moment, you will be redirected to the Digg site, due to the restrictions of the official Digg button. But if you hit the next button before you are redirected, all of your diggs will be registered. Also it will not display any stories that you have already dugg! That is my improvement over the official interface.