Who Killed DZone?!

While heading off to DZone to check out the latest programming headlines, we were shocked to see the new interface. What happened to DZone!?

The new interface is cluttered and unintuitive. It stinks like Digg, and is a hundred times more bloated than the previous edition. The DZone that used to be there was a organizend and professional place for programmers to submit links. It required a reason before you “dugg down” entries, and it loaded a hundred times faster.

But the new DZone is just scary. It’s as if Kevin Rose bought DZone and handed it over to the teenagers to play. It has the same blue shades, the same cliche rounded tabs, the same “Web 2.0” look, and the same exact concept…

How long will it take for DZone to add a general news section next?

YouTube Today, Digg Tomorrow?

So YouTube is gone. Google “snapped it up” as everyone is calling one of Google’s biggest all-stock buy-outs to date. It wouldn’t surprise us if 2006 became known as the “Year of the Mergers” with all of the big corporate buy-outs, merges, and transfers. But as always, yesterday’s today’s news makes people ask “What next?”

If we had to guess, we’d say Digg. All the tell-tale signs of Digg scrambling for the last dollar are there, and just like YouTube, it has a pattern. But in order to talk about Digg, you have to take a look at YouTube first.

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Digg v3 and its New Algorithm

Digg has a new design: it’s nice & clean. Digg v3 also has a new backend – that happens to be the exact opposite. It seems that in adding support for new non-tech categories and changing the algorithms to match the lesser traffic and activity in those sections Kevin Rose and his team managed to mess up the algorithm for the rest of the site, leading to much trouble.

The new digg algorithm seems to ‘solve’ something that had previously irked many people: the difficulty of getting a story on the homepage. But maybe there was a reason why it’s difficult. It used to be that a story posted by the right person and dugg by the right people at the right time in the right place could get to the homepage after 50 diggs. For everyone else it took a lot more – something closer to 100 just to make it to the homepage.

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