BackViews | The death of a trailblazer
Views | The death of a trailblazer
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Pioneers don’t always go out in a blaze of glory, especially in science and tech. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was far ahead of Marconi in the field of wireless communication, and invented microwave transmission and solid-state physics (which lies at the core of semiconductor technology), but remains unknown outside India. Preston Tucker, a 1940s American automobile entrepreneur, invented the concept of the rear engine, real wheel drive, disc brakes, magnesium wheels, and many safety features that are common today, but the Big Three carmakers of Detroit made sure, through corrupt politicians and media, that his company collapsed (Today, Tucker cars get auction prices of more than a million dollars). In the early days of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs got most of his bright ideas—including the graphical user interface and the mouse—from work already done at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Centre (Xerox did nothing about these inventions).
Who could have imagined this even four years ago, when Google was pursuing Digg with a $200 million warchest, and Digg’s investors were holding out because they expected a far higher pay-off in the future. For Digg had invented the “social news network", where users decided what news was important, and what not. This would have a profound impact on media and social networking. In its own way, it also invented news aggregation, which would spawn the likes of The Huffington Post. And last but not least, it had come up with the idea of user voting to decide the hierarchy of posts on a site. The “like" on Facebook and the “+1" on Google Plus are direct descendants of the “digg" function. Digg was one of the sites that powered Web 2.0, the paradigmatic change in the Web-user relationship which we take for granted today.
So what went wrong? To a very large extent, Facebook and Twitter, and to some extent, Digg itself (It gets less traffic today than Reddit, that started off more or less as a Digg clone). When Facebook and Twitter started allowing users to share links, it became pretty clear pretty soon that given the information blizzard we live in, people prefer to get pointers to important/ interesting stuff on the web from “friends", rather than an anonymous mass of netizens. A story whose link had been posted by someone you knew (or whose tastes, interests and views you had become familiar with over time through his postings, even though you’d never met him) was more likely to be read than a story which 32,000 people who you didn’t know from Adam thought was important. Digg’s idea had been copied, and human psychology in the times of information overload took care of the rest. At the other end were sites like Huffington Post, where you knew that a set of editors had sat down and chosen the best news and analysis for you from the whole mess out there.
Digg got squeezed in the middle, and in desperation, went through several redesigns and revamps, which, however, only turned away loyalists and added no new users.
Betaware has announced that it’ll merge Digg with its news.me, which relies on the simple idea of delivering the most popular stories on Facebook and Twitter to users every day. How it plans to use the Digg acquisition, and even whether it will keep the brand alive or “bury" it (which is what you did on Digg when you “unliked" a piece) is not known. But whichever way one looks at it, this is the end of the road for a pioneer whose influence pervades our life on the Web, even though we don’t know that.
Kevin Rose, who set up Digg, however, has not done too badly for himself. He sold Digg stock during various fundraising rounds, when Digg was valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2008, he invested in Twitter (valued at $8 billion last year), and sold some of his shares at what one assumes would be a very healthy profit. He was also an early investor in Zynga, the social games company that created Farmville and Mafia Wars for Facebook, and whose market capitalization is currently around $4 billion. He resigned from Digg last year and is now an angel investor and a partner at Google Ventures. In an interview last week to a Wall Street Journal blogger, he said: “I look for the next big thing. I look for consumer internet companies that I would use, and getting into them as early as possible."
Clearly, he also knows when to exit.
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