ext337: [Future of Web Apps]The digg story from one idea to nine millions page views

Weblog

Hear how the digg phenonmenon all began, the lessons learnt along the way and what digg will be doing next

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Presenter:
Kevin Rose, Founder and Cheif Architect, digg

goal of Digg was to create a site where everything you see was choosen by the user
turns editing role over to the users
shows stories that users have submitted that have a made the homepage (rewards users).
2K to launch (Developed a project spec – elanace; open source technologies – LAMP; Basic utilitarian design; $99 a mo. hosting)
Feature Decisions (tools for self-expression; stay away from me too features; simple and rewarding – one click; destroy the garbage; experiment – stack, swarm, bigspy, activities of users)
Stamen design – flash visualization house
how do you develop an algorithim for removing things (how does the reputation of the user play into whether or not somehting is buried)
users are given tools to see what other people are gathering around
ways for the users to experiement and find new things
how we can make ways of discovering new stories interesting to our user base?
give your developers some time to experiment and play w/ your data and design something that they think is cool?
core belief that they should drive views to the originators of the content
500K registered users; 10M+ pages per day; 1M+ daily unique visitors, 90+ Linux boxes
great need to optimize queries
recommended reading: “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend”
Future plans (learning from uswers interests; digging other types of content onlne)