Those of you who read my post about Diggs new toolbar last week will know that I wasn’t the biggest fan of it (neither was Jonathan Bailey). Infact, I added a frame blocker to BloggingTips and removed the Digg vote button because of it.
So I was pleased to see that Digg are responding to the backlash. John Quinn yesterday announced (Yet) Another DiggBar Update. In the post he outlined two main changes which will be getting rolled out within the next week.
New treatment to the behavior of Digg short URLs. All anonymous users, on or off Digg will be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect (301), no toolbar, straight to the site. Logged in users that have not opted out will continue to see the DiggBar (200). These changes ensure that content providers receive full search engine ‘juice’ or credit for all links on and off Digg. They also ensure that Digg short URLs won’t appear in the indexes of any major search engines.
- Because we want to ensure the best user experience, the DiggBar will soon only be shown to you when you are logged into Digg. While the vast majority of Digg users find the DiggBar valuable (only a very small number of users have disabled the feature or hit close with any frequency) we understand that many folks were confused when opting out. We want you to be able to have the option to permanently disable the DiggBar with ease. For registered Digg users receiving the bar, we are also making a few changes to make the process more obvious.
This is very good news in my opinion. Soon only registered members will be able to see the Digg Toolbar and they already have the option of removing this from their profile anyways.
My view on frames has not changed though. I am keeping a frame blocker on Bloggingtips as I don’t believe other websites have any right to control how the content here is displayed. However, I am pleased that Digg has taken these steps (not sure if they had a choice!) and I have added the Digg Voting Button back underneath posts for BloggingTips readers who like Digg.
To read the announcement in full just click on the link below.
Link : (Yet) Another DiggBar Update
* A big thank you to Darren Rowse who brought this to my attention via Twitter today.
This is certainly good news and, as you said, I don't think that they had much choice. When the backlash around the blogosphere is that strong a company can either listen and maintain goodwill or ignore the feelings of their loyal users and risk tarnishing their reputation and losing a large number of their supporters.
This is a welcome move by Digg. It's good to see that nowadays big sites listens to feedback and take appropriate actions. We saw same thing happening with Facebook, when they rolled back their new T&C's after much hue and cry.