What should you read or watch today?
Digg is hoping to help you answer that question with a new launch of an old service, News.me. Renamed Digg Deeper, the tool uses signals from the people you follow on social media to surface the most interesting and important news of the day.
It’s not a new idea. News.me was originally a Betaworks-developed iOS social news app that was scrapped in 2012 after running afoul of Twitter’s API display requirements. Betaworks, which also owns Digg, kept News.me going as an email newsletter. Nuzzel and Prismatic offer similar services and even the New York Times is experimenting with Vellum, a reading list generated by what your friends are sharing.
Digg Deeper’s wrinkle is its link to Digg, which has rebounded nicely from its near death and employs a team of editors to curate the best of the web. Digg Deeper users will see recommendations on a scrolling list on the Digg home page, real-time email alerts and notifications on an iOS app.
Here’s the description, from the Digg blog, of how it will work:
The magic ingredient is the way we analyze your Twitter feed to determine the right threshold for your alerts. For example, one component of the algorithm measures the activity around every link in your feed. If you follow tons of accounts that are linking to many hundreds of stories a day, you might get an alert when 5 friends share the same link. But if you follow only a handful of accounts, you might get an alert when just 2 friends share that link.
Digg Digger invitations are going out first to longtime News.me subscribers. After the Betaworks team is satisfied with the platform’s stability, it will be opened to the public.
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