Tyler S. Miller

Posts Tagged ‘kevin rose’

Digg v4 Preview

Kevin Rose, founder and current CEO of Digg.com created a video showcasing the new features in Digg V4.0.  V4.0 is bound to be released very soon, and I am very impressed with the current setup.  Watch this video showcasing the upcoming features:

Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
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Digg Reduces Staff by 10%

In the past week, social news site Digg has reduced their team by 10%.  An official post from their blog, and CEO Kevin Rose:

Hey everyone,

This morning we faced the difficult task of reducing our team by about 10%. This was an emotional and rough morning for everyone involved. Laying off dedicated and hard working individuals is extremely difficult, but we tried our best to treat everyone with the utmost respect and support. I hope all of you will join me in the effort to assist all of those affected, be it as a reference or a referring source and most importantly, as a friend.

This is one of the hardest decisions we’ve had to make recently but we strongly believe that it is the right decision for the long-term 
health of the company. In order to achieve our goals, we are putting more emphasis on the engineering and development efforts. In fact, we are still hiring for these teams as they are critical in getting us to where we need to be for the future, for our impending upcoming redesign and much beyond. The only way for us to truly succeed is to adapt and adjust as necessary.

I’m sure there will be many follow-
up questions to this email. So, we’ll be holding an all hands today at 3pm where you can ask questions and share your comments.

Thanks,

Kevin

What’s this mean for Digg?  I think it means the same thing for all the other companies that are having to make the same move.  Many businesses, large and small, are laying off their employees due to economic times.  I feel Digg will get through this with heads held high, and in the end, this will work out for the better.  Good luck to all Digg employees that were laid off, best wishes in the future.

Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
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New Digg Content

As stated in other blog posts on tylersmiller.com and elsewhere on the Internet, previous CEO of Digg.com, Jay Adelson, has moved on to newer and better things.  Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, has taken the acting role of CEO for the time being.  He had the following to say in a a recent episode of Diggnation:

TechCrunch reports:

He didn’t talk much about the new version of Digg, now massively behind schedule and getting more so every day. Please, Kevin, accept my invitation to sit down with us on video to talk about the future of Digg. It was just about a year ago that we talked about Digg’s serious plans to get back in the game. iPad apps are great, but there has to be more to the plan than that.

I cannot wait to see what the new Digg v4 looks and acts like, and I cannot wait to see if Rose will stay on as full-time CEO or who will be brought to the table to take over the news media company.

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 11:47 am
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So Long DiggBar

The Facts:

When Jay Adelson stepped down as CEO of Digg.com, Kevin Rose took over.  And with that, he began rolling out a lot of changes right from the start.  Rose has made a lot of bold statements recently, concerning the DiggBar.  Rose stated the following in a Digg blog post:

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg (sign up for the beta here). That said, we will continue to iterate on our browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and IE. Look for seriously revamped versions of those in a few months.

The DiggBar will become no more when Digg v4 comes out sometime soon.  You can sign up for their beta here: http://digg.com/new.

My opinion:

It’s about time they do away with the DiggBar!  I cannot stand that thing.  I never sign into my Digg account because I know that when I click on a story, that damned bar will show up.  It was a good concept and had high hopes for Digg.com and it’s supporters.  But, to me it was just not efficient.  It was essentially loading two pages at one time on one page.  If that didn’t make sense…let me explain further.  When going to Digg.com and finding a nice story you want to explore, you click the article and it opens a new tab or window.  The top portion of this window was essentially the DiggBar.  The DiggBar showed total number of Diggs, total views to that URL via Digg and then contained a link to see the article without the DiggBar.  So, back to when you clicked the article, Digg.com would open a new tab or window, and display the DiggBar at the top, along with the main page of the article at the bottom.  It was loading two pages at one time….and in most cases they were both very slow.  Diggs efficiency overall has gone down, and when websites hit the front page of Digg.com, they become overloaded and slow as well.  So, two slow things loading at one time, and all you want to do is read the article.  Doesn’t work out so well for those bloggers whose stories hit the front of Digg.  Another thing is validating the path of the URL.  You do not see the main URL when clicking on an article.  You are displayed with a random Digg.com URL that forwards you to the article.

I am glad to see the DiggBar go.  Are you?

Sunday, April 11th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
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Digg CEO Steps Down

Credit: Time

Five year Digg CEO Jay Adelson steps down today.  An official statement from Jay on Digg’s blog:

After five years, forty million users, and an amazing
ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg. With the new Digg
getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing,
our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup
phase, I feel that now is the right time.

He states that over the next twelve months he plans on doing some entrepreneurial work.  He thinks with the recession, it is a great time for new companies to come forth, and I guess that by stepping down, Digg accomplishes that.  In the meantime, Digg founder Kevin Rose will take over as interim CEO.

Kevin Rose posts on the Digg blog:

I want to be the first to thank Jay for the last five years of amazing
work. You’ve been a great friend and mentor, we wouldn’t be where we
are today if it wasn’t for you.

While I’ll miss working with Jay day-to-day I am excited to be taking on
the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our
promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the
conversation around it. We’ve been super busy on the product side
getting ready for the upcoming Digg redesign and delivering our mobile
apps for the iPhone and Android.

Thank you very much for your on-going support of Digg, I’m truly
excited about the next five years, big things coming!

Good luck Jay in future projects and business opportunities.  He has done good things for Digg, and Digg will move forward.

Digg Blog Post: Update from Jay

Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 2:08 pm
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