Details regarding Digg's redesign first came to light earlier this summer, when a limited number of users were given the opportunity to sample the social news site's Facebook- and Twitter-inspired look and feel. The new Digg finally launched Wednesday, bringing with it the ability to follow friends and publishers. Unfortunately, the service is currently suffering from many problems.
Visiting into the revamped Digg is a slow process. Chalk it up to massive amounts of people bombarding the site at once, or one of the hiccups that come with a system-wide update, but it took over minute for the homepage to load.
After a lengthy wait, a large box prompted me to log in with my Digg account or, alternatively, my Facebook or Twitter account. This, too, proved troublesome; the system rejected my username and password, and at other times wouldn't let me click "Login" to send the information. Attempting to log in with my Facebook and Twitter credentials produced an error message. In fact, our own PCMag homepage was a victim of Digg's problems; pages with Digg buttons failed to load.
Still, it's possible to explore a bit. The first thing you'll notice is the heavy use of the blue-and-white color scheme that permeates all aspects of the site, down to the Digg buttons and comment section. The list of topics that once lived as a strip across the top of the page is now located in a vertical column to the left of the main content area. Digg also brought the "Submit a story" area to prominence-instead of hid away in a corner, there's now a large box for submitting the link. This couldn't be tested as you have to be logged in to add content.
The purpose of the redesigned Digg is to transform the site into a true social-networking site rather than a horribly gamed link-dump site. Users accessing the "My News" page will see content promoted by their friends scrolling down the site.
Currently, clicking on story links either opens them very slowly or produces errors; clicking the "Comments" link resulted in an error the majority of the time. On the rare occasion when the comments field opened, there was a new button, "Follow", which would've ideally let let us follow the news submitter.
Surely, there are issues to be worked out. We'll follow up with an in-depth hands-on of the service very soon.