I was lucky enough to be at FOWA today and to hear Kevin Rose speak about the future of digg.
I was unlucky enough for my Tablet PC to crash and lose my notes from the session [my own fault]. What follows is from memory. Forgive the consequent ‘notey-ness’.
Digg will support OpenID. The emergent portable, open ID system recently given support from Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! will also work on digg.
Digg will never pay moderators to check for false/lame stories. Rose doesn’t believe that is a workable — or rather, scalable — model for the system. The moderation, he thinks, needs to mirror the community to have any meaning. “Policemen every five steps won’t make any difference,” as Rose (probably) said.
The discussion pages will allow the upload of links and ‘other’ media to support stories. This will also be a part of the story validation system, whereby proponents and opponents of a particular claim can upload evidence to show this.
Digg can already spot spammers easily using their statistical data. 100 user accounts that all agree with each other on everything is easily spotted, for example. He showed us these rogue stories appearing on a graph available internally to the company and swiftly being buried. Rose did not state whether the managers of digg take any action in these circumstances. My impression was that he was saying that they do not, because users are more than able to detect spam stories and bury them.
Digg is working closely on making users’ data work better for them. In the not-too-distant future, it will be able to recommend friends to you on the basis of your common likes and dislikes, and also upon their geographical location. It will also be able to personalise the ‘upcoming stories’ queue to show stories you are most likely to be interested in.
On the flip side of that, digg will be able to personalise the people you interact with and do not. Rose hopes that this will counteract the effect of “900,000 people being in the same room and, of course, they aren’t going to get on”. Or, as a delegate put it: “people on digg are assholes”.
Rose confirmed that digg is actively mining users’ attention data in order to implement these changes. He professed ignorance of APML, but “there are a couple of engineers deeply into this stuff” back at digg HQ.
Digg will imminently introduce a ‘smart’ digg-this button for blog and website owners. A single line of JavaScript will detect whether or not a story has been dugg already and advertise the number of diggs a post has received.
A Flash toolkit is in the works that will allow site owners considerable flexibility over displaying data from digg on their own sites.
Generally speaking, great conference so far, but lack of internet access today means I’m still catching up. More news tomorrow, I hope.
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Envy overload. Please reboot yourself…
Ok, I have to admit that I was quite late and the “Sold Out” on the FOWA website had killed my smile!
Well, OpenID is receiveing a lot of attention, and I’m quite happy about it, because it seems it is really good (at barcamp, few days ago, I followed a good presentation about it).
Digg is gaining more and more, and even if I’ve heard more critics on it, it’s quite normal if you are so huge…
Cheers
Digg 2.0!
Hey Carlo: sorry not to be able to meet up with you at this event. Get yourself an Upcoming account and we’re bound to bump into each other at one or other of these geek events.
OpenID is a seriously big deal. I’m hoping to implement it into the comments system on this site at the weekend. Single sign-on is a fantastic relief!
OpenID is a disaster waiting to happen! I am sure for sites like Digg if a userid is stolen it would not mean a whole lot, so what do they have to lose? But, think about your financial institutions. Do you think they will open up to this concept if they do not have control of the userid? In the case of OpenID, the id (and path) is controlled through a 3rd party. For OpenID to be approachable there would have to some modifications to OpenID’s policies of ownership, dissemination and management.
Why is this a disaster? Because it introduces the Single Point of Failure issue. If some or all those Ids were stolen, then ALL of one’s sites are vulnerable multiplied by many.
I think this one of those ideas and concepts that will need some maturation before it begins to take on the big guys.
@Bob: big guys are already taking on it. Microsoft is implementing it for Vista and Digg is no small guy.
Single point of failure? People use the same password for every service they use anyway.
I don’t really think the primary intention for OpenID is financial transactions, and like you I don’t see it happening soon, but for the web it’s a really good idea.
Microsoft I don’t consider a “big guy” as they are implementing this in name only. ALL their financial areas are NOT implementing this. Their Knowledgebase? Ok, no big deal.
Big Guys=Financial institutions.
I guess the point for me is that you get to choose that ‘single point’ rather than the third parties you use now. Given that most current systems use email for password retrieval, your choice is unlikely to be as insecure as email.
Also, if you’re worried about your ID provider, use several OpenIDs, and don’t use them at all for your bank — not that they’re likely to allow them anyway.
But, isn’t using multiple OpenIDs the same as simply having multiple IDs.
I don’t understand your issue with 3rd party. My reference to it related to banks allowing 3rd parties to control their userids and passwords. The 3rd party in this regard is OpenID.
For non-financial and non-critical accounts, OpenID is fine for me.
My whole point is that OpenID is not the panacea I reading in the media.