Poor Digg, you were such a promising thing – so promising, in fact, that you thought you were worth way more than the $200 million Google offered you. If only you could"ve seen that four years later, you"d be selling yourself for a cool $500,000.
Yes, that"s right: Digg has sold itself for what amounts to chump change in the tech world. A mere shell of its former self, the Digg team is probably kicking itself for not taking Google"s massive offer, now that it"s no longer the coolest kid on the internet.
A New York technology firm called Betaworks is hoping to revive the flagging company to compete against the likes of CondeNast"s reddit, which took the lead from Digg last December, and has held tight ever since. And while it"s still possible that they can turn the company around, we"re afraid that there"s no good news whatsoever for Digg"s employees: Betaworks says that they"ll be unceremoniously dumping each and every one of them.
We did a little research on Betaworks, and discovered that they"re the folks behind bitly, but we weren"t very familiar behind any of their other offerings – Findings, something that lets you share clippings from your Kindle, bloglovin" (these people really hate capitalizing the titles of their products), a site that lets you build a personal newsfeed, and some other stuff we"d also never heard of.
One of Betaworks offerings is News.me, an app that delivers "must-read stories" shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and The Wall Street Journal says that they"re going to be folding Digg into that. Considering that we"ve never heard of News.me in our lives, despite the fact that it"s been around for over a year, the future does not look bright for Digg. Then again, we"ve been surprised before.
Thanks to Mephistopheles for the tip in our forums.
Update: According to TechCrunch the figure is actually closer to $16M:
According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story.”
Via: Gizmodo
Source: The Wall Street Journal | Betaworks