

DiggBar Is Here. Go Shorten Those URLs - Mazy
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/diggs-toolbar-is-here-go-shorten-those-urls/

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garply
Does framing annoy anyone else? I never use these bars, they're just like
popups that I have to squash before I read the actual site.

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brandnewlow
Thanks for the heads up. I just checked to make sure my frame-breaking JS is
working properly. Death to framers.

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brandnewlow
I just noticed that Digg now has all their outbound links aimed at these awful
new frame-URLs. I didn't realize they were doing that as well.

This is very disappointing.

I run a niche social news site, so I've spent hours and hours comparing and
studying what's out there.

Most social news sites are, spammy SERP factories. They lift other people's
content in the hope of getting enough Google mojo that their site will outrank
the original source of the content in SERPS. That's the business model.

For a long time, the easiest way to tell the difference between a legit
aggregator and a crummy one was to see where their headlines pointed.

If you go to a crummy aggregator like Mixx.com, the headlines on the front
page don't point you to the site whose content they're lifting, they point you
to a Mixx summary page where there's just a single blue link that will lead
you to the source of the information.

Obviously this is done to boost pageviews and to keep the user on the site,
rather than letting them get to the information they're looking for.

This always seemed like the obvious way to do things. Lame, too.

And yet Digg and Reddit's headlines have always sent you to the actual sites.
And I really, really respected them for this. Whenever I'd see a new social
news site doing something sketchy, I'd take comfort in the fact that the two
biggest players were also the ones taking the most generous, "good"
approaches.

I guess it was only a matter of time before one of them gave in and did
something that's actually worse in some respects than directing to a summary
page: hijacking the brand, URL, and advertising of the sites that it links to.

Digg is a very influential site. As disappointed as I am in the company for
doing this, I'm even more worried about other sites looking at this and saying
"fuck it, we're doing it too, now."

Imagine if every link on CNN, NYTimes, MSNBC, WashingtonPost.com led to framed
pages.

We all complain about mainstream news never linking to the sites it covers.
Well as soon as they figure out how to frame all outbound links and run ads
around them, you can bet they'll be linking out all the time.

The bar has been lowered.

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ashot
Facebook beat them to it ;) Agreed, though I predict it will quickly fall to
the same fate as the popup. It will go beyond a certain threshold of
annoyingness and then websites, users, and browsers will block them out of
existence.

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AndrewWarner
These bars are going to be an eyesore. Facebook has one. HootSuite has one.
Now Digg.

What happens when I post a page with a Digg bar on Facebook? Bar pollution,
that's what.

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brandnewlow
For a sick laugh, I played around with a few combos:

Hulu via Digg Via Facebook looks great.

Hulu via Outbrain via Digg via Facebook looks even better.

Observervation: The Facebook frame does not allow other sites to frame it! The
same goes for the Stumbleupon frame as far as I can tell.

Death to framers.

I should get some shirts that say that printed up.

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pierrefar
In 2 month's time, we'll look back at Digg's traffic graphs and see a kink
around today that marks a period of significant growth.

Congrats to the Digg team. Very nice implementation.

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brandnewlow
What do you mean? Where will this traffic be coming from?

Counting these framed pageviews as Digg pageviews is at least dishonest to
advertisers and at most plain wrong.

According to Center Networks, the Digg toolbar is running Digg's Quantcast
code. So it looks like they're going to try to do just that.

[http://www.centernetworks.com/diggbar-analytics-ads-
pageview...](http://www.centernetworks.com/diggbar-analytics-ads-pageviews)

~~~
pierrefar
I mean that given the simplicity of how to use this (just prefix with
digg.com), the number of stories dugg, and the level of interaction with Digg
will both go up significantly. The toolbar (if we call it that) has Digg tools
built in (related stories, etc...) and has sharing tools for Twitter, FB,
email, etc. This is all designed to drive traffic to the main digg.com site.

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zurla
what a killer SEO move. a ton of links all pointing to digg.com. they already
get a ton of search traffic, but it will only go up from here

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flexterra
I will use this a lot, super cool.

