MMMeeja

Digg is pretty cool, and I’ve been a subscriber to their RSS feed for a long time. The feed always had one problem that I was prepared to put up with, but recently they have changed it to make me seek an alternative.

Every entry in Digg’s RSS feed used to point to their own page, making you click another link to get to the page/story they were promoting. I put up with this (just) becuase there were a handful of benefits:

• The Digg page has some useful comments
• If the dugg site went down, the comments would usually point to a mirror
• Digg showed me an advert (or nine, very slowly) which paid their bills

Then the change happended.

The straw that broke the camel’s back.

They made the Digg story page open a new bowser window. 100% of FAIL! Nobody messes with my browser. Digg, You are out!

An Alternative - Feedit

Luckily, there’s another service that is ready to provide Digg’s content without making readers pay through their blood pressure - Feedit.com provide a handy alternative to Digg’s RSS feed that takes you directly to the site being promoted. I am much happier and the number of clicks required to get where I want has been halved.

Of course, some of the benefits of the original feed have been lost - immediate access to comments etc. but the time saved across a hundred or more items per day is significant. Feedit’s feed includes links to the Digg page, comments and submitter so the information is readily available without much effort anyway.

Conclusion

Seemingly small inconveniences can annoy your readers and it’s easy for them to find an alternative. Designers and bloggers should always strive to improve the user experience and doing the opposite for the sake of a potential improvement in revenue (I assume that was Digg’s motivation) is always wrong.