Work

27 Jul 2008

if i had $200m i’d buy digg

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Posted in Work | 5 Comments

So apparently google have pulled out of buying digg.com at the last hurdle in a $200m deal. That’s a big shock. I fully expected google to buy digg because it makes sense in so many ways.

Digg probably has the largest community of webmasters and internet addicts under the one roof online – very influential people.

All the big bloggers, big news sites and video sites are using digg. As a result, if it’s not on digg, it’s not worth talking about.

Digg would have been the perfect weapon to pin down the ‘news’ area online for google. That’s why i’m very surprised google have backed away from it.

Perhaps Google fear the community is too powerful or influencial – after all, digg users have made their feelings known in the past (multiple times too) – google don’t like that sort of power being with the end user.

$200m, although mega bucks – is also pretty cheap i feel (not that money is a problem for Google anyway). Google could integrate digg with youtube, igoogle, google news and see it’s value rocket overnight – it’d be great way to knit everything together.

Given the fact we’re hearing google are testing social interaction features on search results (in other words – stealing some digg style features), it really is baffling why they’ve backed out of the deal. Money obviously isn’t a problem, so it doesn’t leave many other problems… perhaps the digg crew wanted a slice of shares or to stay in control when google had other plans? I’m sure we’ll find out at some stage.

  • http://www.johnjosef.com john

    Quote:
    “$200m, although mega bucks – is also pretty cheap i feel (not that money is a problem for Google anyway). Google could integrate digg with youtube, igoogle, google news and see it’s value rocket overnight – it’d be great way to knit everything together.”

    See, that’s the problem. Everything is becoming integrated. Just like Wal-mart for the internet. Is that what you want? I use the internet because I want a great experience. I want something unique. If Google runs everything (or Yahoo! or MSN or whoever) the internet will become stagnant. There is already many indications of this happening already. The web is being flooded with zombies and script kiddies who think their crappy applications help the world when in reality it just makes people lazier and communication is mixed up and meaning is lost.

  • David K

    ‘if i had $200m i’d buy digg’

    that’s why you don’t have $200m in the first place; you’re somewhat lacking in business acumen…

  • http://www.smemon.com smemon

    Integration is crucial for the internet – integration is the future of the internet.

    I’m by no means a google fanboy – quite the opposite. But at the end of the day, google are the only people on the planet who can afford to buy the likes of digg and not only buy it, but develop it further and use their arsenal of talent to fine tune it and integrate it with their current services.

    Google are blatently ‘ripping off’ digg’s social features in their new search – so it’s pretty obvious google are fans of the ‘community powered’ results style of rating/organization of data.

    At the end of the day, digg organize data – they do what google do only better as it empowers users, makes them feel like part of the site and as a results increases loyalty and a community feel – that’ why the digg community is so strong and hasn’t been taken over by spam.

    Google see this, realize it’s the future and have started testing it out. That’s why i can’t understand why they backed out of buying digg… i can only assume it was digg’s issue with google and not the other way around.

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