Betaworks aims to rebuild Digg completely by August 1
updated 06:59 pm EDT, Fri July 20, 2012
10-person team hopes to finish within 6-week window
Digg is being relaunched by Betaworks. A post on the company's "Rethink Digg" blog states that a 10-person team of engineers, editors and designers from News.me have been working for the last few weeks on a new Digg website. The team hopes that the new version of Digg will be ready by August 1, after six weeks of work starting from scratch.
The new Digg will not simply be a reskinned version of News.me, however the two services will become one single product in the future. While the team hopes to keep the site dedicated to social news, it has not said how it will differ from the existing version, aside from starting with a fresh code base. Bringing a personalized news experience to Digg is seen as a long-term aim, one which the team admits will take "some time" to accomplish.
Betaworks bought the Digg domain, code, data and traffic for around $725,000. The Washington Post Company hired most of Digg's staff in May at a cost of around $12 million, while LinkedIn is said to have paid between $3.75 and $4 million for 15 different patents owned by Digg. One of the catalog of patents bought was to "click on a button to vote up a story."
