Social News, Digg | featured news

The search giant says it inadvertently removed Digg, in its entirety, from its search engine... Digg, which bears little to no resemblance to the site it once was, is still alive and kicking as a curated collection of top news stories from around the Web -- just not in Google's world. If you queried Google for Digg links earlier this morning, you found that the search giant had no recollection that Digg ever existed. Seriously. As Martin MacDonald, an online marketing specialist, observed in a blog post, Digg disappeared altogether from Google's index.

News.me, the social news service incubated at betaworks, announced today that it’s officially shutting down its iOS apps and removing them from the App Store. The company is also claiming that it’s yet another victim of Twitter’s latest API guidelines, and states that Twitter may have even viewed its service as a competitor. We might not go that far, but it makes for a good story.

Currently, the “New Digg” is facing a host of problems. Digg has 14 million pages indexed in Google, those pages are now 404′ed. Digg’s entire database of archived content vanished over night, including now-defunct user profiles. In one swift move, they’ve completely eliminated the community by removing each and every user account to exist,with little explanation and no answer to when users will be getting their accounts back.

Digg rose to prominence years ago by changing the way people share news online. But its subsequent downfall – and $500,000 sale to Betaworks on Thursday – underscores the swift evolution of technology that is helping people discover content online.

Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web.

Once the shark is jumped, the downfall begins, and a social media site loses relevance, it's officially over for them. MySpace, Propeller, Yahoo! Buzz, Pownce, Mixx -- the list of social sites that couldn't turn it around goes on and on. Digg is proving to be the exception and it's an important twist for every social media site alive today.

Digg users have already started to notice a new Beta feature called ‘Newswire’ that Digg announced on its blog this morning. ‘Newswire‘, a real time Top News section on Digg that ‘allows users ‘to be editors’ and help choose the Top News instead of just reading it.