Digg sale may prove useful for Pligg webmasters

[JoeWa]

The acquisition of Digg by Betaworks may be useful to us Pligg webmasters in determining our focus, not losing sight of the reasons for running such a platform and hope for the future:

"Daily Disruption – Digg Has Definitely Been Acquired, But By Who, and For How Much?"

[web20guy]

I doubt very seriously that anyone running a pligg site, baring possibly Bizsugar, will be-able to attain the level of success that Digg has.

[JoeWa]

.

[DuneLee]

Digg shud hav patent "click a button to vote up a story" And maybe Reddit and stumbleupon wont even exist. Facebook will pay Digg for it use of its "FB like" function.

Before someone here say "Its impossible to patent that"

Apple owns a patent on "slide to unlock"
Yahoo! holds a number of patents on "pay per click" adverting

[Yankidank]

Digg did patent exactly that, and sold that and other patents earlier this year.

Digg Sold To LinkedIn AND The Washington Post And Betaworks | TechCrunch

According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story”

Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k

Many people say that Twitter was the biggest factor in Digg's demise, since people started sourcing news from Twitter. I think that Digg's algorithm for publishing stories was what did them in. It was abused by corporate sponsored members and limited the front page to only a select few powerful contributors. The other major failure was their loss of members to Reddit, who have maintained an independent community feel. Reddit has survived because of their lack of VC (venture capital), which would probably force them into a revenue model that the community would be put off by.

[ChuckRoast]

I agree with Yankidank. Digg did themselves in. I think it started with the well known revolt May 2nd 2007. Something had happened that had never happened before. The users of a website took it over and I think Digg was taken back by that and wasn't expecting such a backlash. Ever since then the algorithm changes, toolbars, news readers and other failed marketing strategies drove most of their base users away.

You've heard the old adage "if it's not broken don't fix it." Well Digg did the complete opposite and in-turn broke nearly every aspect of the users experience. Do I think that the Digg sale will have any effect on Pligg? Nope, not one bit. We are a completely different animal than Digg. We provide a social publish platform that can be easily tailored for specific niches. We have stayed small and focused on almost solely on the code. Sure, we add a new feature here or there but each version is always more polished then the last. As you will see in the upcoming Pligg 2.0 we've gone with a simple clean interface and visual enhancements that make the product run cleaner and smoother than any other before it. The hours alone Yankidank and I spend on Pligg each week shows that we have a love for this project and have nurtured it quite well over the past seven plus years of our lives. A project that once started on a small shared hosting package has now outgrown several dedicated servers and has it's head office now located in San Francisco.

We like to think of it as we're growing together. Us and our users. Most features added to Pligg come in the form of suggestions from our own users. We feel that is really impotent to keep those positive lines of communication open. There will always be people that will say negative things about a project such as ours. It happens to all of them. Some people feel entitled to assume we will work for them for free creating or helping with customizations. That's not our job. Although we try our best to help where we can, but most end-users don't understand the complexity or scope of their idea.

There are many fantastic Pligg sites out there. I know of one who has 13500 active users, and when I mean active I mean over 20,000 submissions, over 151327 votes, 26,000 comments, etc. They are a niche site and are a close knit community.
Social publishing is still in its infancy and will always continue the upward mobility. As someone who has written over 200 modules and over 50 templates for Pligg. I can tell you that Pligg 2.0 will be amazing. I already have several specialty modules built and ready to come out as soon as Pligg 2.0 goes into the wild. Some of these modules are the most advanced modules I've ever written. That's why you haven't seen many releases from me lately, as I want these to be absolutely perfect. Just a hint at a few of them. 1)A complete advertising module. Lets users buy banner space for a specific amount of time, tied into paypal. No 3rd party advertisers to worry about clicks, and getting pennies. 2) instead of reading the news like you normally would, you read by geographic location. Submissions are scanned and a location is determined and placed on a map along with the other submissions. 3) Real time sports scores and schedules that I am building for a friend. 4) Tmelines. There is an overall timeline of published content and each user will have his/her own timeline as well. 4) User galleries. Will allow your users to upload photos from their profile page. Images will be thumbnailed and the visitors to a persons profile can open any image in a modal window along with being able to share that photo on facebook and twitter.

Those are just a sneak peek at whats coming your way.
Thanks and Keep on Pligg'n

[web20guy]

I doubt very seriously that anyone running a pligg site, baring possibly Bizsugar, will be-able to attain the level of success that Digg has.

I should know better. Never use the word never (although it's just inferred here). I splice optical fibers and I always hear from the operators, "We'll never be back here." Five months later your back doing adds or changes.

By no means did I mean to sell Pligg short. I've been a dedicated user of the platform since '07 and have no plans to change. Works perfectly for our needs.

I agree 100% with Chuckroast that there are plenty of great sites out there running the Pligg platform. Any one of these could be twice what Digg ever was. It's all about the community. One of our sites may fit into the category of a successful pligg site. The active member base is 10,000+, 43,000 submissions, 108,000 votes and 5500 comments.

I look forward to version 2.0 and the new modules that will be available. Especially the interactive-user functions, some of which Chuckroast outlined in his response.

[sukrut51]

"Pligg is far better than Digg".. and this statement is not to just show my support to pligg but i MEAN it..

and i totally agree these lines Chuck said

You've heard the old adage "if it's not broken don't fix it." Well Digg did the complete opposite and in-turn broke nearly every aspect of the users experience.

i am having a project running on pligg..though with alexa ranking of 150k, i've got VC of 50k(indian rupees) from a belgian investor.. and we still have far to go..

A BiG thanks to PLIGG developers from a proud pligger..