Diggbar links now land on Digg instead of original sources

Digg users recently noticed some interesting new behavior related to Digg's shortURL service, the Diggbar: instead of shortlinks going directly to their destinations, logged-out users who click them will now land on the corresponding Digg.com page. Sure, that's a lot of new traffic for Digg, but it's problematic because the change was never announced, and users who generate Digg links might not know where they're pointing.

Some folks are reasonably upset about the change, including Mashable's Pete Cashmore, who posted the headline, "Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links." Mashable got confirmation from a Digg representative that the change wasn't a glitch, but was working as intended. After the Mashable post went up, though, Digg's Kevin Rose posted on Twitter that he had been on vacation and was not aware of the change. This story is still developing, but I suspect it will end with Digg going back to its old way of handling short links.

Tags: controversy, digg, diggbar, redirect, shorturl, tinyurl