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For some start-up founders, once you get the bug to create your own companies, it is hard to stop. Just ask Kevin Rose.

Mr. Rose was the founder of Digg, a link-sharing message board that grew popular at a time when the social web was growing into adolescence. He worked on his own start-up incubator, Milk, before it was acquired and closed by Google. After a spending time as an investor at Google Ventures, he started another incubator, North Technologies, to figure out his next full-time app focus.

Mr. Rose seems to have found it. On Thursday, Mr. Rose, 38, announced that his five-person team working on Watchville, a news aggregation app focused exclusively on wristwatches and based in San Francisco, will merge with Hodinkee, a site for wristwatch enthusiasts.

Mr. Rose will take the full-time position of chief executive of Hodinkee and plans to move to Manhattan, where Hodinkee is based, by the end of the month. Along with Benjamin Clymer, Hodinkee’s founder and editorial director, the team has raised $3.6 million from True Ventures and a handful of angel investors to continue expanding the effort.

After the merger, Watchville and Hodinkee will continue to exist and grow as stand-alone entities under the same roof.

The move is a departure — both existentially as well as in location — for Mr. Rose, who has been something of a symbol of Silicon Valley start-ups, perhaps unintentionally. With the rise and eventual fall of Digg, he became emblematic of a young company founder who seemed to have struck it big, only to see people move on to the next popular website. Betaworks, a start-up incubator in New York, bought Digg’s assets in 2012 and relaunched the site with a more curated editorial approach to showing content on the site.

Timepieces are also something of a new passion, which Mr. Rose is pursuing from personal experience. When his father died in 2011, Mr. Rose inherited a luxury wristwatch, an item he had never worn before. From there, he delved into watch message boards and enthusiast sites, vacuuming up information about watches from tight-knit online communities obsessed with the hardware of horology.

Watchville was born out of that pursuit of information about wristwatches. The merger with Hodinkee aims to attract a hard-core, dedicated audience to using the Watchville app on a regular basis.

“It’s not about going into a mall, pointing at a case and buying something for the bling factor,” Mr. Rose said. “It’s a geeky thing, and once you get into this world, you get into the internals, you go deep.”

Hodinkee is regarded as a reliable source of information among watch enthusiasts, and the pairing provides a sense of legitimacy to the effort. Mr. Clymer, Hodinkee’s founder, said his site aimed at objectivity in wristwatch reviews, hands-on experiences and columns written by regular contributors like the musician John Mayer, who is a watch collector and an investor in Hodinkee.

“This space revolves around trust, and we’re a totally independent voice,” Mr. Clymer said. “We already have the trust, but until now we didn’t have the tech to build out a stronger community around what we’re doing.”

That is where Mr. Rose and his team of five technologists from North come in. Though he declined to comment on specific product plans, Mr. Rose said that he would draw on his experience from building online communities like Digg, and that the company planned to look at what it perceived as 10 inefficient models of used and vintage watch sales online.

“People do a lot of really shady things out there with used and vintage watch reselling,” Mr. Rose said, noting that it is easy to run swindles with online sales. “No one has really created transparency for the community.”

EBay also dabbles in emphasizing its online auctions for timepieces, partnering with larger auction houses that sit on millions of dollars in unsold inventory. But Mr. Rose and Mr. Clymer said many sites offering watch sales online leave out vital pieces of information that are important to hard-core watch enthusiasts.

Ultimately, success may rest on Mr. Rose’s ability to foster a community among the already-dedicated watch lovers of the Internet. Lately, he is not shying away from his past failures as an entrepreneur; earlier this month, he wrote a blog post admitting failure has freed him to move on and learn from his mistakes.

“I believe that it’s best to be upfront when things don’t work out,” he wrote. “Emotionally it’s quite freeing for the entrepreneur, and in talking about and explaining our failures we all benefit and learn.”

Perhaps that mind-set will carry on into Mr. Rose’s next venture, as well as his next home on the East Coast.