Digg River Update Lets Users Contribute

The most outstanding aspect of Digg River is its minimalism. It’s an RSS feed to stories popularized on Digg, fed in a fashion that makes mobile devices happy. Some of the site’s users even enjoy the feed so much that they prefer to visit Digg River via their desktop-based browsers rather than sift through stories on the main Digg.com website.

The end of the month of March marked the beginning of a new Digg River, however; many must surely have already noticed. What’s new about it? Digg members may now log in to Digg River in order to “digg” stories right from the page. Yep, it’s true. You can.

It’s no longer a passive stream of titles, subtitles, and links to original pages. You get to contribute to the “Digg effect” anywhere you might be. In front of your computer. On the grass of a city park, cell phone in hand. Anywhere. (Just make sure your mobile device can read the code the updated version of Digg River appropriately. Steve Williams of Digg writes on the Digg: The Blog that “some low-end phones can’t handle it.”)

For many months now, we who’ve taken advantage of Digg River’s existence have been content to be passive readers. We spend our time in between things to catch up on what’s hot in news (that includes things that aren’t so cool) at any particular moment. But it’s pretty much been stuck in the ‘good enough’ bin of our lives. We can’t leave comments on Digg River, which is half the fun of Digg itself, and prior to March 30th, we couldn’t give a plus-one to any linked pages we enjoyed.

This means that the folks at Digg have cut the Digg River to-do list down to one major task, and it’ll be a while ‘til we see anything of a comments feature at the site, if we ever see something of that stripe at all.

Digg River is there to be a simplified, barebones alternative to Digg, formatted with mobile devices in mind. So, naturally the list of things desired by its users, now that the site features operable ‘Digg’ buttons alongside all stories, is quite small. In fact, I can’t think of anything more that I’d personally want. Perhaps links to the “most dugg” comments?

I’m sure I’ll be waiting a while ‘til something like that comes about. For now, the updated Digg River looks like the perfect second-place solution to Digg.com.