New Owners Take Digg Back To The Drawing Board, Relaunch Scheduled For August 1

After Betaworks acquired Digg earlier this month, there was a lot of speculation about what the company planned to do with the service. Today, Betaworks’ New York-based News.me team, which is now in charge of Digg, posted its first update. The plan, according to this update, is to launch a new Digg v1 on top of a new infrastructure and fresh code base by August 1. With this launch, the team says, it’s “taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.”

The new team argues that it plans to take the lessons it learned from building the personalized news service News.me to Digg. The new site won’t just be a “reskinned News.me” either. Just like News.me, though, the new Digg will focus delivering personalized news based on what your friends are sharing. The new owners are open about the fact that figuring out what exactly to do with the site “will take some time,” though. To get some feedback from the community, the new Digg team posted this survey.

Here are the principles that are guiding the developers according to today’s update:

We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.

Monetization, it seems, is not on the developers’ radar quite yet.

Betaworks and the News.me team are clearly interested in rebuilding Digg and the community that once made it the darling of the Web 2.0 boom. For now, though, it still remains to be seen what this new Digg will look like. Today’s update is more of a mission statement and low on details about the features we can expect from the new Digg (though chances are the developers are still trying to figure this out, too).

Digg is a user driven social content website. Everything on Digg is user-submitted. After you submit content, other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the front page for other visitors to see. Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004. He found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea. In addition, Rose paid $99...

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betaworks believes in the power of the real-time social web. We believe that the popularity of the real-time and social aspects of the web represent a radical shift in how people use and interact with the Internet. The future is about dynamic streams of information, not static pages. It’s about push, not pull; it’s about enabling publishing tools and data; and it’s about the ways we touch, experience and interact with the Internet and each other. With this...

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News.me is a small team based out of betaworks in New York City, focused on building applications that improve the way people find and talk about the news. News.me is currently available on iPhone, iPad, Email, and Web. The back end uses a combination of Twitter and bitly data to surface only the most relevant content. News.me for Email keeps an eye on your Twitter stream throughout the day, then presents you with a list of the most important links shared...

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