Betaworks bought Digg, the website, for about half a million. It’s a complicated sale. Linkedin acquired the patents, and Washington Post got the talent (the engineers).
The first thing Betaworks did was relaunch the site on August 1st. I noticed because their RSS feeds stopped working on Wopular. They had rebuilt and redesigned the site from scratch in just six weeks.
Design-wise, it’s now a three-column site - like Wopular (and Pinterest) - with headlines and thumbnails spread within each column. It doesn’t look as organized as before when headlines only occupy one column.
I finally had to do it. I stuck with Digg for as long as I could. It’s the first social news site. Even after the infamous version 4, I stuck with them.
A decent number of Digg's hardcore users had already jumped ship since v4. I was too lazy to do the switch - mainly because the headlines I saw on their homepage didn't quite fit those on Wopular's. Digg was still providing me with relevant and interesting news.