Charbax.com

Kevin Rose just announced the Digg Story Suggest Feature on the GigaOM TV show:

So what we are doing is that you’ll see a feature come out here in the near future that is our Story Suggest Feature. We hired some amazing mathematicians to come in and create algorithms for us that take a look at what you’ve dugg in the past, your interests, and starts to suggest stories and friends based on what you’ve been digging. So you’ll see that kind of help out there.

I believe this could be the most awesome feature of Digg if those mathematicians and Web 2.0 engineers at Digg can pull this off in the most optimized and effective way. Basically this would provide a personalised Digg frontpage for each user, not based only on the top stories and top stories from categories which you can filter, but based on your exact taste simply based on your complete previous digging activity compared with the digging activity of all other digg users.

I have been having this idea and suggesting it on Digg since the 19th of July 2006.

Here is the time that I submitted this idea on Digg the first time on the 19th of July 2006:

http://digg.com/programming/Feature_request_Personalized_Digg_and_auto_make_friends

This is the email I sent to Digg Partners [partners@digg.com] on the 20th of May 2007 at 11:32AM CET:

Subject: Personalized News Generator

You should offer this feature at some adress like: http://digg.com/users/Username/personalized/
or http://digg.com/users/Username/recommendations/

with according personalized RSS feed for each user. The user also can choose to have that personalized list of automatically chosen news stories private or public, as well as customize it with different settings, like how important a news item has to be to be added to the personalized news feed.

So each Digg user should get personalized News just based on the stories that the user previously digged.

I can suggest you more tricks about how I think you can do this. Just tell me if you want me to elaborate how I think you should program this feature.

Basically instead of most Digg users reading the front-page news only, there should also be an automatic way to provide automatically generated news based on news that people who digg the same way also digged and that the user has not read yet. Monitoring friends activity is not good enough in my opinion. Friends should be basically chosen by the system automatically, it’s like http://last.fm but for News.

Also I think there should be another way of counting the relevancy of a news story than by simple amount of diggs. Each digg user should have a different representative value based on that users previous digg activity. I can tell you more about my idea of that if you want.

This is the automatic reply that I immediately got back from Digg Partners:

Subject: Re: Personalized News Generator

Thanks for your inquiry about partnering with Digg.  We will review your request as soon as possible and contact you if there is an opportunity at this time.Regards,

Digg Partners

I am not suggesting that I am the only one who has suggested this feature to be added to Digg, nor that I would be the first one to have thought of it, since these suggestion algorithms exist and are implemented on Web 2.0 sites like Last.fm, Amazon, Netflix and more. I am just happy to know I submitted this idea on Digg over a year before it was announced and a few months ago again on email and that it just might have influenced the decision making process at the Digg headquarters if they do at all read Digg stories and their partners@digg.com email (unless this feature has been requested before by other Digg users? Or has this feature been announced officially previously?).

Anyways, I am very much looking forward to this feature being added to Digg. Hopefully it will kick ass. If it does, that will then provide a better reason to Digg stories, since users might in return for their Digging efforts have a better more personalized Digg Story Suggest experience.