Digg.com, the most popular social news aggregator in the known universe, has unveiled its new DiggBar. The DiggBar is six tons of awesome squeezed into a small package. Here are the cool things it does:

  • Makes Digging up stories easier — you can do it from the story’s page rather than having to hit the back button and wait (forever) for Digg to load.
  • It’s an automatic URL-shortener; perfect for sharing stuff on Twitter.
  • You can automatically Digg (and shorten the URL of) any page by adding “digg.com/” before the URL.
  • It can send you to a random page, just like StumbleUpon.
  • Allows you to see how many views (not just Diggs) a story has.
  • Shows you related stories and other stories from the same site with a click of a button.
  • One-click sharing with Facebook and Twitter.

One of my favorite features is the ability to see how many views are associated with each page. I’ve long thought there was a 10:1 ratio between Views and Diggs and it turns out I was right. A story with 2,000 views is likely to have around 200 Diggs and vice-versa.

But no piece of technology is perfect. Here are the crappy/lame things it does:

Overall, the DiggBar is a winner, but there are annoyances. Perhaps the best feature of all is that it’s totally optional. You can turn it off in your preferences on Digg and if you end up on a page with a DiggBar on it and you want to kill it, just click the large X in the right corner and it’ll be removed.

This is a full-frontal assault by Digg on several competitors. They’ve rendered nearly moot URL shorteners like TinyURL, bit.ly and is.gd. They’ve stolen a hugely loved feature of StumbleUpon and aligned Digg with the hottest property around; Twitter — all in one fell swoop.

Well done, Digg. Well done. Just be sure you don’t bite the hand that feeds you — the content creators. As Digg continues to grow it’s essential that it plays fair.