On a positive note, I’m really lovin having the capacity to send shoutouts. It humanizes things so much more. We finally have the capability to speak to those who have long been our friends on the site.

But one important key to bear in mind is that the shoutouts appear under Friend’s Activities. This means that everyone that’s in your network sees all shoutouts sent. The feature is limited to 10 pages, so one needs to be careful to not to overdo it. Unlike MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog, you don’t have the capacity to send private messages. Sites such as those don’t affect other users with messages sent.

Someone who doesn’t use the site to a large extent and doesn’t have a large friend’s list needs to bear in mind that those who have befriended them might may very well have a large list of friends, and when a lot of unneccessary shoutouts are being sent, they’re missing stories that are being dugg up. You’re going to have some very displeased friends who may very well ‘unfriend’ you.

Sending links to others in shoutouts has its pros and cons. It has potential for abuse, so adding friends to your network is not something to be done without caution. If they’re brand new to the site I’m very leery, whereas I might not have been so stringent in the past. I have mine set to only receive shoutouts from friends.

One thing that hasn’t been noted here is something that’s quite major, to me, anyways … the removal of Friends Upcoming Diggs. I’ve added friends to my network who I trust based on what they digg up. This section was what I looked forward to the most. Now that it’s been removed, it takes hours to go through the thousands of diggs submitted daily. It’s next to impossible for me to find diggs that friends have submitted or voted for through the period of a full day.

I have to rely on Friend’s Activities now which is only 10 pages long. You can’t see what’s been happening over the course of several hours, let alone the day. There’s the redundancy of many other friends digging the same stories, and it doesn’t even show if you’ve already dugg the story. Who can remember titles alone without the description and URL without a photographic memory?

And getting back to the shoutouts to send links … people have been reduced to sending them to friends they think would like to see a story. There are rumors that the algorithms watch for this and don’t bear much or any merit if you vote for it by digging a story that way. Not to mention the negative concept of gaming the system that this could portray. And don’t forget, there are only 10 pages, so one has to be very conservative to send links to friends.

I find countless stories on front page when I arrive that I wasn’t even aware had been dugg to begin with. What else am I missing that I would have liked to see? And I spend 2-3 hours as it is now almost daily trying to filter through the Upcoming section.

I’ve used Digg as a news site from day one, and it’s the one site that’s most often a daily designation for me. I can’t see myself using it as a networking site. I can’t keep up with those I’m at already.

My thoughts are that those who have used Digg for a long time, and those who are key players in the community won’t use the added features either. It’s difficult enough as it is maintaining anonymity from those who would hound them to submit stories on their behalf, and attempt to take advantage.

I don’t even add others at Facebook unless I know them personally. It’s not a networking site to me, as people can learn more about you than you care to share to perfect strangers. I save that for MBL and BC.

But as new users sign up, the whole system may very well evolve to more of a social site than a news site. I would have much preferred that they used the KISS system, keep it simple. Provide shoutouts which was sorely missing, and leave the social networking to sites that are already doing it best.

‘at least they’d make for an intelligent date’ … that’s hilarious!

The numerous click-throughs one has to perform just to see a Digg in Friends Activities is highly annoying and time consuming. What’s the point? To prevent blind digging? They’re your friends as it is! You can’t see the URL from the site it was dugg up from, let alone the description to find if it’s of interest to you or from a site you trust.

I hope that there are plans to add to the Favorites feature. As it stands you can only see the 3 most recent.

Many people have been long awaiting a picture section, so this is one feature that will be very welcome.

All I can say after this, is DIGG, PLEASE BRING BACK FRIENDS UPCOMING DIGGS!!! and HURRY!

Although I know about Digg I have not used it a great deal in the past as I feel I have no hopes in getting much traffic through it

Sorry to give you more work to do Kim. Lets hope we will be able to consolidate all our social networking efforts to one or two places in the futre and concentrate more on comments which is much more fun.

What a great round-up, Sue. I had no idea you are “into” digg. I always knew you are into “digging”