Last month we had reported on a potential Digg toolbar that would compete with StumbleUpon.
Digg has now launched a new product called the ‘DiggBar’, which appears at the top of the browser whenever users click on any story on Digg. The DiggBar is portable to any website, making social news sharing much easier, but ways to exploit it are already cropping up.
The quasi-toolbar provides a lot of facilities to make it easier to Digg content. The DiggBar allows users to Digg content directly on a site, instead of having to move back and forth repeatedly, between the destination site and the Digg submission page.
Screenshot of DiggBar above a story on BBC.co.uk.
In order to view the DiggBar, users need to merely type “http://dig.com/” before the webpage address. A short URL will be created for that page and theDiggBar will appear at the top, framing the page.
Users can share interesting stories, via email, Twitter and Facebook, easily through the DiggBar. They can also see the top comment, the latest comment and the most controversial comment posted for the story on Digg, while still on the story page.
The DiggBar also shows the number of Diggs, pageviews for the page, related stories, and other stories from the same site on Digg.
Much like the StumbleUpon bar, the DiggBar includes a ‘Random’ button that brings up a random Digg story for users to browse and rate.
Users of the Twitter desktop application ‘Twhirl’ can expect an update, which will allow them to use Digg as their default short URL service.
While all of this is largely positive news for the once darling of social media, the DiggBar is already being exploited by some. As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.
