Digg 2.0 almost ready for prime time: faster, less draconian

Late last night in Texas -- at the infamous and indefatigable SXSWi convention -- Digg's CEO Jay Adelson showed the world a new and revamped version of Digg. This overhaul, which has been five years in the making and the primary focus of the Digg team, will elicit a dramatic change in the slow, unwieldy and demagogic nature of the service.

Along with the usual Web 2.0-esque streamlining (rounded corners everywhere, I bet), Digg will become faster, more responsive and instant. Users will now be able to submit pages and Digg other submissions even if they're not logged in. This fundamental change, according to Adelson, will see the number of daily submissions climb from a meager 20,000 to millions per day -- "can you handle that much content?" gloated the proud CEO, no doubt throwing his head back to emit a maniacal cackle.

To accompany the new site, Digg is also dropping its old MySQL back-end in favour of a new, 'very, very fast' infrastructure.

Dubbed 'Digg 2.0' by CNET, there's no sign of when the new version will be rolled out to the general public, but there is a holding page at 'new.digg.com', where you can enter an email address -- presumably to join an open beta, when and if it comes.

Tags: digg, news aggregator, NewsAggregator, social networking, social news, SocialNetworking, SocialNews, update