While many are still mourning the impending closure of Google Reader, some companies see the situation as an opportunity to reach new, previously unattainable users. Take Digg, for instance. Once a well-known brand, the socially driven news site attracted millions of users on a daily basis. But as the Internet evolved, Digg did not. Traffic eventually waned, and the brand was split up in a major sell-off last year.

These days, it's not all grim. Digg has undergone quite a makeover in the last year. While two-thirds of the company and its staff were traded off to LinkedIn and the Washington Post Company, the name “Digg” stayed with Betaworks. This kept the brand alive in some form or another, and the company has since received a major facelift—a new layout, a new objective, and a new business plan. Digg wants to fill the Google Reader-sized hole in the current RSS landscape.

This plan all started back at the drawing board. “The idea was that we would try to answer the question that Digg has always been useful for, but to do it a different way,” Andrew McLaughlin, CEO of Digg, told Ars. “That old question was: what is the most interesting stuff on the Internet right now?” Rather than go back to Digg’s old ways of aggregating crowdsourced content and asking users to vote up the Internet’s biggest hits, Digg hired a small team of editors who could pull in data from different sources, read it as much as they could, and then curate it for their readers.

“That’s what you see right now on the homepage—that’s the 60-70 stories that you see every day,” McLaughlin continued. Digg's current website is editorialized, showcasing stories that Digg’s editors find the most interesting and relevant for its audience. Most of the stories fit within technology and science—a true testament to who Digg considers its main demographic to be—but this isn’t the extent of the plan.

The Google news came in March. Digg soon after announced that it would be re-prioritizing its product roadmap for the year in order to focus on building an RSS reader from scratch. “While we had long planned to build something like this, we had no idea we’d be attempting to do it so soon or within such a tight timeframe,” the company wrote in a blog post. “But after Google’s announcement last week and Reader’s imminent shutdown, we think it’s the right thing to do. It’s certainly the self-interested thing to do, given how much we all relied on Google Reader.”

Building a better reader

“If you’re an individual out on the Internet, you’re likely being confronted with a massive flood of stuff every day,” said McLaughlin. “It’s just too much.” Rather than build a site where a reader’s content is dumped onto one page in reverse chronological order, the team set out to create a way for users to sort and rank what they’re interested in so that it’s simpler to peruse. “We’re going to start to move toward more ways to rank and distill content,” McLaughlin continued.

One of Digg's solutions is a feature called Popular. This lets users rank the last thousand unread items from their feed by popularity. The service exists now on its site, though it’s not especially curated for each individual’s interests and social circles. McLaughlin added that Digg would like to implement a way to show what is trending globally, locally, and even within a user’s social feed by pulling in data based on the people they follow and the things they like and share on Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, the team is toying with the idea of ranking items within a feed by length and by “grade level." McLaughlin explained this idea in an e-mail:

There's a technique called the Flesch-Kinkaid readability test that tries to measure how difficult an English text is to understand... We've been playing around (nothing more than that, so far) with the idea that we could measure the reading level of Internet content, so that the Digg Reader could rank pieces by the most difficult to the easier to comprehend (or vice versa).

“The trick for the user interface is going to be for us to add these capabilities in but to make them comprehensible, not contribute to clutter,” he added.

The Digg team has also started brainstorming how to provide relevant information about an article that might otherwise be hidden in what McLaughlin refers to as a “baseball card type of way.” “You might be looking at a story in Reader and then flip it around to see which of your friends are tweeting it, which countries are talking about it the most, [or] what are some other stories that are similar or current,” he explained. “The big picture is: we’re trying to build a basic extension of the Digg thing, which is to try to give people ways to cut through the noise and pull signal out of it—pull interestingness, relevance, or importance out of the flood of content that’s out on the Internet.”

An iOS app window to the future

As part of its plan, Digg will also launch Reader for mobile users, beginning with an iOS application for both the iPad and iPhone (now available) and following suit with an Android application next month. We got a chance to look at the beta build of the application and it looks entirely promising, though it's not quite there just yet.

























Fortunately, Digg's reader application has made the transition easy for veteran users of Google Reader. Once you fire up the app, you can immediately import your feed over from Google Reader. (After the service closes down on July 1, Levine said that users will most likely be able to add their Google Takeout OPML file.) Afterward, you can view content that’s making it big on Digg’s front page or cycle between your feeds as you see fit. You can also read saved articles—even ones that you’ve starred on Google Reader—and any that you’ve personally dugg. So far, this is extent of the Digg feature for the application. Rob Haining, iOS Engineer for Digg, says the team is working on bringing more functionality to it. “We’re looking for ways to share a list of things you’ve dugg with other people… maybe offering an RSS feed of those things.”

You can link your Facebook and Twitter accounts for sharing, in addition to Instapaper, Pocket, and Bit.ly. Haining even described one “hidden” feature of the app that allows users to subscribe to and listen to podcasts. “We definitely didn’t build a full-fledged podcast app, but we knew that people that [use] RSS might also subscribe to podcast feeds so we wanted to offer basic support for that." When you subscribe to a podcast feed, you’ll be able to listen to it within the Digg Reader app without having to navigate to a specific media application to do so. On devices like the iPhone, the app will even show media controls on the lock screen, and you’ll be to AirPlay it out to other media.

For the most part, the Digg Reader is just like any other RSS reader available in the iTunes App Store. It features a simple interface with some sharing and archiving abilities, but there isn’t much else that sets it apart from the rest of the bunch. It’s Digg’s foray into RSS aggregation—or rather, curation—that could be the real force here. McLaughlin mentioned Digg had the idea to release this kind of product before Google ever hinted that it would shut down reader. He said that releasing the unfinished piece of work now allows Digg to capture this market of users in search of a new reader. Hopefully, the product can also get that audience interested in what’s to come.