Digg.com to become more social and more useful

I just found out about some of the changes planned for Digg in the coming weeks and months. TechCrunch broke the story last week with an unlisted video Kevin Rose published for the benefit of publishers and influencers Digg wanted to give a preview of the next iteration of the site to. Although the video is unlisted, it is still available:

I haven’t used Digg all that much but the planned changes will make Digg a lot more useful to me. I like how Digg will adopt this curation model for news where I will see news items people I follow have found useful and interesting on the My News page. I have been thinking about changing the way I follow news feeds to match a similar model and rather focus on reading the news the people I follow have shared rather than trying to keep up with the 350+ feeds I currently subscribe to.

Although I do worry I will miss something, having thousands of unread items in Google Reader doesn’t exactly inspire me to spend more time reading. There is just too much to read and while Google Reader bundles sound like a great idea, if you subscribe to a high volume one there is similarly no incentive to keep up. My thinking is to become more selective about the news sources I follow directly and then spend more time reading what the smart people I follow share with me.

This social news model should work quite nicely in the new Digg too and I am looking forward to that coming out. Being able to integrate with your social graph on services like Twitter and Facebook will be a useful way to immediately follow those influencers you rely on and make the news streams on Digg a lot more relevant and useful.