Posts Tagged ‘Matt Williams’

Just days after the beta rollout of Digg Newswire, Digg put out the call for beta-testers for what it called its “next innovation.”

Read more

Having second thoughts about that Digg? No worries: There’s an Undigg button now.

Read more

The subject of the next Digg Dialogg will be author, “evangelist,” and strategist, Guy Kawasaki, who is in the process of promoting Enchantment, book No. 10 for him, in which he discusses how to influence people without compromising ethics.

Read more

Digg finally officially addressed the rumors and speculation about the departure of founder and Diggnation host Kevin Rose (pictured) that surfaced late last week in a blog post by CEO Matt Williams, in which he emphasized that Rose’s role had not changed since he stepped back from day-to-day decisions last September. Highlights:

We’ve been hearing a lot about how Kevin Rose is launching something new. Everyone knows Kevin is an entrepreneur at heart, and he’s had many projects in the works over the past several years. We’re excited to see what he comes up with next. Kevin continues to be committed to Digg’s success; his role as founder, board member, and Diggnation host remains unchanged. When I took over as CEO last September, Kevin stepped back from the day-to-day decisions. I’m proud of the great team we’ve got at Digg, and they’re the ones to credit for the changes you’ve seen and the new direction we’re pursuing.

When I joined Digg, we had just released a product that was not ready for primetime. It really upset our users. Over the first few months, we dropped in the number of daily visitors and page views. But through this crisis, the lines of communication between Digg and our users opened to unprecedented levels. We received tens of thousands of comments and suggestions from the Digg community about how to restore the site they loved.

Read more

Digg announced that it filled its vacant vice president of engineering post with Ben Folk-Williams, who had held the same title with Vast for the past four years.

Prior to Vast, Folk-Williams led engineering at Coremetrics.

Digg CEO Matt Williams said:

This has been our most important role to fill at Digg. We were looking for someone who has led the development of a scalable platform, built strong teams, demonstrated operational excellence for website performance, and has a history of developer-driven product innovation. We came across Ben and realized he fits all of those qualities, and many more — including being a longtime Digg user.

Ben has been coding since fourth grade, loves big data problems and high-volume websites, and can often be seen in coffee shops in the Mission district (and now walking over to Potrero!).

Folk-Williams added:

Digg has fantastic fundamentals — a great brand, 20 million monthly uniques, with a very passionate core community, committed investors, and an exceptional team. Digg is uniquely positioned to redefine how people discover news, and it’s great to be a part of that.

The latest installment of Digg Dialogg will feature someone quite familiar around Digg headquarters: CEO Matt Williams.

Questions can be submitted to Williams as comments on his post on the Digg Blog through Thursday at 9 a.m. PT, and the full interview will be posted Tuesday, Feb. 1, at noon. Williams wrote:

Over the past four months since I’ve joined Digg, our team has been committed to staying connected with our community. From San Francisco to Serbia, we’ve received tens of thousands of comments and suggestions. I’ve also had the chance to meet in person with many longtime users of Digg, through lunch gatherings and focus groups in a few different cities.

We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and the result is a number of changes to Digg.com — such as reinstating buries, bringing back the Upcoming section, adding filters to browse images and videos more easily, and launching an improved mobile site. We’re hard at work on other features and site design changes you’ve requested, so stay tuned.

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on how to make Digg.com great. Please keep it coming.

Read more

This has not been a good week for Digg, and it’s only Tuesday.

First, the content-sharing site announced Monday that it would slash its staff from 67 to 42. Then, later that day, Digg user LtGenPanda published a long, detailed blog post titled, “Did Digg game its own system to benefit publisher partners?” and accusing Digg of creating fake accounts to boost the Digg referrals of its publishing partners.

Recently named Digg CEO Matt Williams on the layoffs, from the Digg Blog:

When I joined Digg six weeks ago, we set an immediate focus on improving the Web site. We listened carefully to user feedback and started making changes to generate momentum in our business.

As I mentioned in one of our first all-hands meetings, another top priority was to take a hard look at the entire business, across product, sales, and operations. Through the time I have spent with each of you, I’ve been impressed by the commitment and enthusiasm you’ve shown. I’ve also learned a great deal about what is working well at Digg, and what is broken.

Many things are working well. The team is listening and acting quickly on the feedback from our passionate community. We’ve been able to deliver nimbly on the new platform, with over 100 bug and feature releases to the web site in the past two months. Our Diggable ads product has seen a notable increase in use by advertisers and clicks by users.

Unfortunately, to reach our goals, we have to take some difficult steps. The fact is our business has a burn rate that is too high. We must significantly cut our expenses to achieve profitability in 2011. We’ve considered all of the possible options for reduction, from salaries to fixed costs. The result is that, in addition to lowering many of our operational costs, I’ve made the decision to downsize our staff from 67 to 42 people.

Read more

Matt Williams, who left Amazon.com to claim the CEO chair at Digg at the end of August, introduced himself in a post on the Digg Blog, in which he revealed that the bury button will soon be unburied.

Williams succeeded former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, and Kevin Rose assumed the title of chief architect.

From Williams’ post:

It’s certainly been an eventful first month on the job. As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process. Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear.

Recently, we’ve been reinstating a number of the features that many of you loved about Digg. In the past two weeks, we’ve brought back the “Upcoming” section, started restoring user profiles from the previous version of Digg, and made small but important tweaks to the site, including better pagination. In the next few weeks, we’ll bring back the bury button, restore all user profiles (including comment and submission history), add filters and navigation for videos and images, provide a tool for users to report comment violations, and update the Top News algorithm and overall site design based upon your feedback. The result will hopefully be a much better Web site experience.

I’d also like to share some insight beyond what you may have seen or heard in the press. Despite the changes to our platform at the end of August, there were still 23 million unique visitors worldwide using Digg last month. Digg today is a much faster Web site, operating on an open-source platform. And with the launch of My News, you now have more personalized control on Digg by filtering news with the help of friends and others you choose to follow.

Read more