Gadgetory

I can't do it we'll do it live well do it live it do it live I keep on writing and we'll do it live thing sucks I'm John Borthwick and I am CEO of bata works we bought Digg because it is a it's a wonderful iconic web 2.0 brand the site was scheduled to be shut down at the beginning of August so we realized that we had to run very fast in order to rebuild Digg we decided to write the whole thing from scratch and we knew that we had a great data set that could identify what our popular stories in the internet and we knew that we wanted to have an editorial touch to curate that we have three editors really with their finger on the pulse of what's going on right now we could have bought the site and like you know plastered more ads on it or done something kind of like just completely commercial but yeah we truly want to build something that people love again and come back to we think that mobile is key for everything in software these days everybody's on the go you always have this thing in your pocket you can turn on paperboy and Digg which will let you basically set different locations like your home or office and then whenever you leave those two locations will automatically update with the latest news I'll get your reading list as well and you can read that offline on the subway or whatever in terms of sort of developing the website and the iPhone app simultaneously we had about six weeks to do it but we used a lot of the infrastructure and code that we've built for news me and adapted it to this new platform that we built news that me it is still a social news aggregation product where we look at social signals on Twitter and Facebook basically the conversation that your friends are having and the internet as a whole to figure out hey what's great content that you should be reading it seemed like a good fit for us to sort of work on Digg with the experience we've had with social web and real-time news so yeah the news not me team is now the digg.com team 92 percent people wouldn't recommend the current Digg to their friends so that can give us some license to really go far and with the redesign it was really you know looking at the current version of Digg looking at people's reactions to like the whole Digg design like iterative process and how people react to the things and what they reacted positively to and what they reacted negatively to and saying people didn't really like the Digg bar at all like we didn't like it and the public didn't like it so why support it so in some cases like it was really obvious what we you know knew we weren't gonna build in other cases it was a little tougher like things like comments which are important for community we felt like we had to you know take a pass on for now we had to make a decision that we wouldn't adopt the existing infrastructure and it was really a decision about being able to turn dick back into a startup I mean in the end I think people have to be able to come to to dig and find stuff that they can't find it anywhere else you know that's that's sort of what Digg was about in the past and I think that's what that's one thing that we have to continue to do