Image via CrunchBase

No doubt you know about Digg, the social news site that lets you "discover the best of the web". It's been a popular site since it first hit the scene four years ago. It's had its fair share of supporters and detractors along the way, from those who thought it would revolutionize news on the internet to those who claimed it to be a portal to clueless sensationalism. But now, does anyone even really care?

Twitter recently announced that Digg has come to the service, with fifteen different Twitter accounts to provide popular stories for various of the site's different categories. About the only discussion about this is on Digg itself, so far. On FriendFeed, all of two comments about this showed up, neither of them showing any interest in Digg at all. In fact, blogger Ari Herzog had this to say about Digg's new Twitter accounts: "Who's going to follow any of these 15 feeds? Not me."

I have a Digg account, and once and a while even use it. But lately, anything that I would have originally posted or voted on in Digg has seen me use Reddit instead, or occasionally StumbleUpon. Either service offers more flexibility than Digg, especially in the categorization of pages submitted to them. (Also, their Firefox add-ons work a lot better than Digg's, but I'm not comparing those, just the services themselves.)

Meanwhile, the business end of Digg isn't looking any better, either. For all its traffic, the site haemorrhages money, posting a $4 million dollar loss just for the first three quarters of 2008. Almost half of the site's valuation vanished since last year. And the execs are looking at focusing on profit before anything else for 2009, giving the idea that they believe the site's on shaky financial ground. It's possible (although probably not too likely) that Digg might shut down in 2009 simply because they'll find paying the bills to be too much for them.

But apart from that, I still wonder if anyone really cares, apart from the Digg team and their core users. Personally, I've already written the service off for dead, since there are many others, in my opinion, that do as good, or better, job in the social news department, than Digg. It's obsolete.

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