Secret Digg Toolbar Being Beta Tested

26 Feb 2009

Just ran across some very interesting news on Twitter and TechCrunch - a bit of news that got me kind of excited!

Digg is going to release its very own nifty little toolbar.

The good news? You’ll be able to Digg articles/picture/videos on the fly, you’ll be able to randomly “stumble” (for lack of better words) other random Digg pages based on past input and habits, so that’s pretty cool (especially for all of you StumbleUpon fans out there).

The bad news?

1. It’s ANOTHER toolbar we have to worry about - or is it.

Taken from TechCrunch:

“The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. users can click on an X to get rid of teh toolbar frame and be taken to the original page. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). By running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on.”

So, yes, it’s still a toolbar, but it looks as though it will work pretty fluidly and quickly to interrupt your internet viewing session as little as possible.

Apparently, the Digg Toolbar is still in top secret beta testing mode, so I couldn’t locate any potential release dates, but since it got leaked on TC, I’m sure it won’t be long. I honestly don’t have any beefs with this - I think it will be kind of cool, and all I have to say is - IT’S ABOUT TIME! Maybe this will revive Digg into the massive beast it once was - not that it’s not popular, but lets face it, a few years ago Digg was THE site to be on.

Here is a screenshot of the toolbar (courtesy of TechCrunch Twitter sources)