Digg 3 vs Netscape Beta
Digg 3.0 was released to the world today with a bunch of new features detailed all over the 'Net, the most important of which are the five new categories now featured. They are tagged "beta", as is par for the course, and encompass Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming. Note that you must be a registered member in order to try out the new categories. The tag cloud is also a new feature that weighs stories based on their popularity. I haven't spent much time in either Digg v2 or Digg v3, so I'll the real in-depth reviews to those more qualified.
What's more interesting is the war being waged between Digg and the new Netscape home page. Kevin Rose fired the first shot by saying that Netscape should have waited until this week to copy Digg's features and now Jason Calcanis fires back about the number of ads on the new version of Digg. My first visit to Netscape's site (just a few minutes ago) greeted me with the (non-anchored) headline, "Digg 3.0 Disappoints". My only hope is that the two communities not use the sites as the battleground and stick to the sites' real purpose.
Digg has first-mover advantage but Netscape has AOL's relatively infinite purse to back it up if times get rough. Like I said, I'm not invested enough in Digg and the two sites are similar enough that I don't really care which way it goes. In the end, it's the users who benefit. Competition is always healthy.
Technorati Tags: Digg, Netscape, social news, news, competition, Web 2.0
