Digg finally unwrapped its new iteration, version 4, to the masses, but it wasn’t without hitches. Some bugs, combined with heavier than normal traffic, caused the site to struggle with the initial load. It seems to be doing better now, but for awhile, some users came across the “Fail Ox.”
Playing off the famous “Fail Whale” and invoking memories of the classic game “Oregon Trail” that many 20-somethings played on old Apple ][ machines in grade school, the “fail ox” popped up when the site was unable to load a page. The instances of the graphic showing up have fallen off, but it’s a clever nod during a period of growing pains, and comes up most often when trying to use Digg search (I just triggered it while writing this post).
Meanwhile, the new version is pretty sweet. I’ve been playing with it since the early beta invites went out and found a lot to like. Social networking imports allow you to find friends on the network so you can follow their stories, and you can follow news sources too, effectively creating a sort of RSS reader mixed with social networking from your friends. Certainly it’ll become more useful as more people you know or trust get on the service, but it definitely looks promising, and I’ve been on Digg more in the past month than I have in years.
SOURCE: TechCrunch
