Digg is being completely redesigned from the ground up to be relaunched on 1 August.
The site was bought by Betaworks a fortnight ago for $500,000 – after being valued at $175m in 2008. Digg started to struggle after a much maligned redesign in 2010, when it tried to target Facebook and Twitter.
Betaworks said at the time of the takeover that Digg would return to its start-up roots, and has tasked a team of ten engineers and developers with rebuilding the site in only six weeks.
“We are a startup team with ambitious principles and we need to move quickly,” the new owners said in a blog post. “The old Digg infrastructure was expensive and it afforded us little latitude to innovate and build at a fast clip.
We are a startup team with ambitious principles and we need to move quickly
“So four weeks ago, we set an a aggressive goal to move to a new infrastructure by 1 August. We are starting with a fresh code base — it’s modern, it’s fast and it’s shiny and new.”
However, the fast turnaround time means many features will be missing from the first version, the team admitted, asking users for patience as the site redevelops.
It also doesn’t plan to immediately make money on the site, saying its first priority is getting users back onto Digg, describing the site as “the messiness of the internet at its best”.
Betaworks’ own news platform, News.me, will eventually be rolled into Digg. “That said, we won’t take anything away from the News.me experience until we can replace it with something better at Digg.”
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