London: The famous American baseball manager Yogi Berra was also famous for his gnomic even Zen-like remarks such as "when you come to a fork in the road, take it" and "nobody goes there any more - it's too crowded".
The latter seems to be the case for Digg, the site that exploded into web consciousness in 2004 and 2005 as part of the new wave of web 2.0 sites that, rather than telling you what you should read, let their readers determine what the day's most interesting stories were. Digg, founded by Kevin Rose, quickly outstripped Slashdot, the "news for nerds" site.
BusinessWeek featured a lank-haired, stubble-faced Rose asking how he could have built a site of such (speculative) value so quickly. The $40 million (Dh146.8 million) of venture capital it has attracted testifies to the excitement about its future prospects.
Now, the latest figures from compete.com, one of the many web metric measurement agencies, suggests that between March and April, Digg lost a third of its visitors from 38 million in March 2010 to 24.7 million in April below the 26 million it was claiming in 2008 when we interviewed Rose.
Why? The suggested reasons vary. One comment pointed to Rose's killing-off in April of the year-old "DiggBar", which meant that any links you clicked on were actually framed inside the digg.com site so people stayed longer. More important, anyone outside who clicked on a http://diggurl would be taken to the Digg site, not the site being linked to.
In killing the bar, Rose said that it had been "bad for the internet". But doing so may have been bad for Digg: if clicking on those links no longer takes you to Digg, there go loads of visitors.
