Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow him on Twitter

When I first heard about the impending launch of the DiggBar, I was annoyed more than anything else. The Digg team has a longstanding tradition of sneering at sites that mimic the functionality of their site while claiming themselves to be innovators in the space (though they themselves evolved from Del.icio.us and Slashdot).

With that in mind, the idea of Digg so blatantly copying StumbleUpon's recent jump from a browser-based toolbar to an iframe toolbar felt hypocritical (heck even Reddit has had a toolbar for a while now). Now that the toolbar has been released to the public, however, it turns that this isn't just a simple toolbar, this is one of the best decisions Digg has made in a very long time.

What The Diggbar Is

The Diggbar is essentially an iframed toolbar that allows you to interact with content on Digg without actually having to visiting the site. The bar shows up at the top of the page you're viewing, followed by the full presentation of the destination site right below.

The toolbar also lets you create short-urls for stories and share them with your friends (to do so, simply add digg.com/ before any url and voila!). The functionality of the DiggBar is very straightforward and the interface is easy to understand and simple to use.







You can do almost everything with the toolbar that you can do with a story on Digg along with a bit more. You can see the current vote count (and vote on the story), read the Digg headline (and see the actual headline and content below), you can see the current comment count (and read the one top comment, one latest comment, and one most controversial comment), bury stories, see related stories and more stories from the same source, share the story via Facebook, Twitter, Email, and Digg shouts, and finally click the random button to go to another random story. If you've had enough of the toolbar, simply click x from the top right-hand corner and it disappears.

The toolbar is quite elegant and non-intrusive and handles the functionality well. It takes up enough room to be effective, but not enough to get in the way. The first half (comments, burying, related stories, and more from same source) are handled via a sliding mechanism, while the sharing is handled via a pop-up that takes you to the site of your choice (for example, Twitter) with the title and DiggBar short-url already filled in. In fact some subtleties of the toolbar actually surprised me.

For example, clicking on a related story or another story from the same source via the DiggBar doesn't take you to the Digg page for the selected story, rather it takes you directly to the destination site, DiggBar intact. Furthermore (and even better) clicking any story from the Digg homepage takes you to the destination site, but now with the DiggBar appearing up top, just in case the destination site doesn't have a Digg button installed. If you haven't seen it yet, here's Kevin Rose's demo:







A few omissions from the toolbar: while you can read three comments (one from each, top, latest, and controversial), you can't read more via the toolbar and you can't submit your own comment via the toolbar either, for that you'll have to visit the website. Both of these functions would make perfect sense since you're already on the destination site, why go back to Digg for further interaction? Additionally, there are no timestamps on the content so you can't tell whether the content is fresh or weeks old. The silliest omission by far, in my opinion, is that the iframe toolbar doesn't automatically appear when you open a link via Digg.com.

What The Diggbar Is Not

The Diggbar is definitely not a competitor to the StumbleUpon browser toolbar and it is definitely not a replacement for the larger Digg experience. In its current state the DiggBar lets you interact with a specific link on Digg (and/or shorten links) and share it with others, and jump randomly from one promoted Digg story to another.

There are no social features in the toolbar and the recommendation engine is unfortunately absent. In contrast the StumbleUpon browser toolbar takes advantage of its collaborative filtering system to display stories that you are most likely to enjoy (not just popular stories) and allows you to select what specific type of content you would like to see (media type and category) and even select specific users and sites to Stumble through.

Ultimately, while the DiggBar is no alternative for the larger social experience of Digg and wont be replacing the StumbleUpon social content discovery toolbar, it is certainly better than the StumbleUpon and Reddit iframe toolbars and is a welcome addition to the Digg offsite experience and will certainly make sharing content easier and more pervasive.

Digg's Smartest Move In Years

While on the surface the DiggBar is an incremental upgrade (to the largely useless Digg Firefox toolbar and a logical next step, if you dig further you will realize that this is probably one of the best strategic business decisions Digg has made in the past four years.

Digg's core business is aggregating shared links and facilitating conversations around those links along with some light social networking. However, because the site itself presents a large barrier to entry for any enthusiasts (i.e. newcomers hardly get to play the field) it makes sense that people new to social media would prefer to congregate elsewhere to share and discuss content - for example, on Twitter.

As one of the most popular users on Twitter, Kevin Rose has been acutely aware of both Twitter's potential and the microblogging site's massive growth over the past year. And after the failure of Pownce, he understands the first to market advantage that has made Twitter the undisputed and unstoppable leader in the space . Furthermore, as anyone who spends time on Twitter knows, a substantial percentage of activity that goes on in people's twitterstreams is simply sharing links - a feature that competes directly with the core business of Digg.

In fact, the hardliner position the website has taken against some of its most active users (and even banning quite a few of them) has sent many of them to Twitter where they have amassed tens of thousands of followers with whom they continue to share links and discuss them, replicating the same experience they used to have on Digg without any penalties. Of course tweetmeme-like services that aggregate performance of links based on retweets (the buttons and votes end up looking surprisingly like votes on Digg) definitely help make the situation worse for Digg.

The Perfect Tool For The Twitter Era

Add to that Twitter's meteoric growth and 140 character limit and you very quickly begin to understand why Digg needs to have a presence on content being shared off their site (particularly on Twitter, and even Facebook) without being intrusive (i.e. iframe toolbar rather than a fullblown intermediary Digg link) and why this link needs to be a short-url. Link sharing is big business and a large part of the market's growth is taking place outside of traditional "digg-like" social news sites (i.e. microblogging and social networking) and it's about time they woke up to that realization.

If you had the option to use one of the more traditional url-shortners when sharing a one of your links, or using DiggBar (with the latter having the potential of getting your content submitted, reshared, and promoted on Digg, to the tune of tens of thousands of users), which would you pick?

But that's not all, sure they want to be a part of the content sharing happening off their site, but url-shortners are big business on their own, with bit.ly reportedly worth $8 million. And of course we can't forget that this is also a preemptive strike against StumbleUpon who is also planning to release their own url-shortner. Best of all, it takes very little in terms of resources to run a url-shortner.







All in all, while the DiggBar is certainly an improvement for the end-user, with one release, Digg is positioning themselves in the center of some of the hottest growth markets at the moment and at the same time protecting their core function of content sharing by taking a little focus off the destination site. As usage of the DiggBar increases, they'll piggyback on content sharing via social networks and microblogging sites as well as corner a very nice chunk of the url-shortner market while increasing the engagement on Digg, without even having people visit the destination site.

More Digg Resources From Mashable