Yahoo to buy Digg! : Oh, no say it isn’t so
Although, Kevin Rose the founder of Digg has directly denied the truth behind this delicious rumour that is sweeping the blog world right now, but I still think there is some credibility to it. Clearly digg has redefined the way social bookmark/link sharing is done. It has created a new standard in the Web 2.0 rev with its great “Diggs” system and also the fun yet useful podcast called “Diggnation” that accompanies some of the week’s top stories. Thousands of visitor pour in on digg everyday. They post their links in the “Submit links section” and if they are lucky it gets promoted to the frontpage. The “User decides it all” strategy has worked very well for digg and on the process it has also spelled the demise for similar tech-sites like Slashdot. Let us take a look at how the page-hit graph looks like for Digg on a daily-per million-basis (image in courtesy of K.Burton and Alexa)
So, you can see that the graph clearly depicts the way digg is getting more and more popular everyday. Its no wonder Yahoo would like to buy out digg, even for a hefty amount like 30,000,000$ (Thirty million U.S dollars only). In order to complete their dominance over the whole Web 2.0 revolution, yahoo needs an aide like Digg. Besides, as digg’s growth continues to grow everyday, they will need hard-core hardwares (eg:better servers, better processing capabilities etc) to keep the site up.
On the otherhand, I so wish that Digg stays an independent company regardless of how lucrative an offer they get. I mean, I love this site so very much…and their podcast is awesome. If they are indeed acquired by yahoo (which Kevin denies, and I pray its true) , it will someway hamper their productivity as under an official logo , they won’t be able to publish their
content as freely as before. If this happens, even digg, “The pinnacle of web-commies” will also be victimised by unwanted censorship. I hope this never happens. Even though, yahoo has allowed great sites like Flickr or Del.icio.us to continue their work freely even after acquisition by the same, but still Digg won’t remain as eventful and as climaxing as before if yahoo buys it out.
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