Brian.Shaler.name | 3rd Party Digg Development

Digg Oracle

The Digg Oracle is a Google Gears tool that indexes your Digg history and allows you to sort, search, and filter stories you have voted on in the past. It uses a local SQLite database to store and parse the data, so after a one-time sync with Digg's servers, the tool does not have to connect to the internet to perform the searching.

Venn Friends

Type in your Digg user name, and you will see a Venn Diagram of your friends and fans. People who you have added as a friend are on the left, people who have added you as a friend are on the right, and mutual friendships show up in the middle. If any of the sections contain too many users to display as icons, it will switch to a scrolling list of user names. Click on an icon or a user name to see their avatars, how many friends and fans they have, some of their recently Dugg stories, or switch to their Venn.

Wheel of Upcoming Stories

The Wheel of Upcoming Stories is a Flash visualization of recently submitted Digg stories. The user can choose a category or subcategory to view, and the matching stories will appear wrapped around a spiral. The titles are color-coded, with more active stories shown in a warmer color (red, orange). The user can spin the wheel using simple mouse gestures, and start/stop it with a click.

Digg Heat Map

The Digg Heat Map was based on the same data as my previous maps of the Digg community. However, instead of drawing lines between friends (and creating a huge mess), each user is represented by a heat-emitting pixel. The more fans the user has, the more heat that pixel will generate. The search functionality was carried over, so you can check out which dot is yours!

Digg RADAR

Expanding from the Map of the Digg Community, I set up a real-time feed from Digg, showing little thumbs-up icons whenever a user "Diggs" (votes on) a Digg story. Of course, this piece also implements the coordinates system from before, so the icons appear on the map where the Digging user is located. I named it "Digg RADAR" after it was completed, because the final product reminded me of, well, a RADAR.

DiggStatus

DiggStatus is a small utility that calculates the average usage statistics of Digg users and compares them to the statistics of a selected user. It utilizes PHP, MySQL, Flash, and XML. A couple weeks after launching DiggStatus, I released a report containing statistical analysis of the data the tool had collected. The article is here.

DiggTaggr

DiggTaggr is a Greasemonkey-powered 3rd party Digg tool that searches for and displays links to Digg stories that are relevant to the one being viewed.

DiggTaggr Data Visualization

It's no mystery that I am a fan of data visualization. 7 weeks after the public launch of DiggTaggr, I decided to challenge myself to display the 115,000 requests by several thousand unique users in the most interesting way possible. The results? Here.

Mapping the Digg Community

Part of the purpose of any social web site is to build a network of friends. Using the recently released Digg API, I created a map of Digg users and how they're connected to each other. If you are a Digg user, use the search feature to find out if you were included in the making of the map. If you were, a marker will be placed on the map indicating where you are.

No-Comment Digg RSS Feeds

No-Comment Digg RSS Feeds are the solution many Digg users have been looking for. The Problem: Quite often, popular Digg stories get hundreds of user comments. This contributes to a slower page load time as well as browser stability issues (when especially excessive). The Solution: All 106 of Digg's standard RSS feeds can be requested through this filter that will alter the URL to the story to a page on Digg that shows the story information, but omits the comments (The "Who Dugg or Blogged It?" tab). The Result: Much quicker access to Digg from your RSS feeds. It's also very easy to select the feed you want (out of all 106), in 2 clicks or less!