Valley Boys. It was June 26, 4:45 a.m., and Digg founder Kevin Rose was slugging back tea and trying to keep his eyes open as he drove his Volkswagen Golf to Digg's headquarters above the offices of the SF Bay Guardian in Potrero Hill. This was the day Rose would test everything. Two years earlier, Rose had gambled on his idea to change newsgathering, letting the masses "dig up" the most interesting stories on the Web and vote them onto his online "front page" on Digg.com. Rose had given every last piece of himself to the project -- all his time, all his cash, and even his girlfriend, who fought with him after he poured his savings into Digg instead of a downpayment on a house. Today, Digg, Version 3, the one that would go beyond tech news to include politics, gossip, business, and videos, was going live.
Slide Show >> Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. That's why some smart money is on Digg to become an ad magnet à la MySpace.com. It's not as dot-com déjà vu as it sounds. Elgan: Why Digg failed. Opinion March 19, 2011 08:00 AM ET The next day, an editorialist writes her opinion about the merger, analyzing the benefits and risks, and coming to some conclusion about its prospects for passing regulatory hurdles.
If someone were to post the opinion piece on Digg, it would often be shouted down as a duplicate story. This is how Digg alienated the opinion columnists. Digg was anti-how-to Digg was originally a content site for geeks. This is how Digg alienated the hackers, do-it-yourselfers and how-to nerds. Digg was anti-self-promotion The Digg community, not the company, has always had an unexplainable opposition to people posting stories they've written. This had two effects. But posting your own content is a no-no on Digg, so the stories are often old and stale by the time they reach the front page. The second effect of the Digg community's bias against posting one's own content is that it drove all the shameless self-promoters to Twitter.
Digg was killed by 'mission creep' Watch this: the origin story of Reddit. Reddit has become a social powerhouse thanks to its mix of aggregation and user-submitted content, but the website was born out of a different idea altogether. Founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian explain that their initial goal was to develop a simple way to order food from local Sheetz gas stations using cellphones. The idea grabbed the attention of Paul Graham — co-founder of Y-Combinator — after the two college students approached him at a lecture.
The plan was ultimately rejected when the duo formally pitched it to the startup investor in 2005, but Graham promised funding if they could devise something new. That "something new" turned into Reddit, what Huffman describes as a cross between Delicious and Slashdot that would aggregate as much content as possible across the web. Three weeks after receiving $12,000 from Y-Combinator and moving to Boston, Ohanian and Huffman pushed out a skeleton version of the site. How I Did It: Alexis Ohanian, Reddit. In 2005, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit, one of the first start-ups launched from the Y Combinator program. A year later, the social-news site was acquired by Condé Nast—and Ohanian was a 23-year-old multimillionaire. Others might have kicked back, but not Ohanian: Over the past five years, he has launched a social enterprise (Breadpig), helped found a travel-search site (Hipmunk), and founded an investment firm (Das Kapital Capital) that has stakes in 25 start-ups.
Meantime, he has also proved a savvy political activist, taking the lead in organizing opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the recent controversial efforts by Congress to regulate content on the Internet. He told his story to Christine Lagorio. I went to high school in Ellicott City, Maryland, and I felt pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.
I was terrified that no one played video games in college. My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. Today I Learned: Reddit Could Be Worth $240 Million. The Emotional Story of Reddit's Start & Sale. Yelp is worth $1.5 billion… Now what? So Yelp shares popped in the company’s first full day of trading, closing up more than 60 percent over the initial price of $15 per share.
This is just the latest in a string of tech IPOs — after Brightcove and LinkedIn — with big first-day gains. And now at $24.58 a share, Yelp has a market cap of about $1.5 billion. So what’s Yelp to do with its new riches? Well, if it’s anything like LinkedIn or Zynga, it will start sniffing around for acquisitions to augment its existing platform, to integrate new features and to add talented engineers.
Here’s a list of some interesting possible acquisition targets for the company. Foursquare To be honest, this is a bit of a long shot, and yet … I can’t stop thinking about how perfect this marriage could be. All that said, there’s plenty of reasons why such a hook-up wouldn’t work: Foursquare’s most recent financing round valued it at approximately $600 million, according to reports. Tello Foreca.st The takeaway Notice a common theme? Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Reveals How The Review Site Catches Phonies.
Get Small Business Newsletters: In a recent interview with Business Insider, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman speaks about the company's response to businesses that buy Yelp reviews to skew public opinion in their favor. Stoppelman explains that the Yelp team runs sting operations to identify 'questionable or shady businesses' that engage in review purchasing. On the Yelp pages of the guilty parties, a large consumer alert posts to notify customers of the indiscretions. The New York Times reports that to snare the unwitting perpetrators, Yelp employees pose as 'elite reviewers' -- people with a proven reputation on the site who are especially valued for the phony practice.
When the businesses reveal themselves, the trap snaps shut and soon after the large, red, alert banner appears. As online reviews became more and more influential in the marketplace, companies started to look for ways to gain an edge on the competition, according to another Times article last year. Related on HuffPost: How I Did It: Alexis Ohanian, Reddit. Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn’t A Failure, It Was A Beginning. “Don’t let him climb a wall. We haven’t finalized his life insurance plan.” That was one of the first directions I was given at Digg when I started in early 2008. “Him” was Kevin Rose, the founder of the widely popular social news site, and I was on my third day.
It was widely known that Kevin was an avid rock climber, though he had recently been extending this skill to common household surfaces…walls, doorframes, stairways. We were heading together to Miami, for his keynote at Future of Web Apps, and he had offhandedly mentioned that he was going to scale the 3-story inner wall of the conference hall. He climbed the wall. That’s how it was at Digg. And voice we had…our company culture mimicked the outspoken, vocal nature of the 39M monthly users we were happily serving. Creating a culture is hard…it’s not something you can artificially build by putting posters up on the wall or having weekly in-office happy hours.
I left Digg over two years ago. Image via: Mathieu Thouvenin.