Siftd.com - Digg 3.0

With the likes of Twitter, RSS and Facebook taking a sizeable chunk out of the tech blogosphere, it’s easy to forget about what was hot only months ago. Like Digg. Digg spawned a revolution in the way the news was read and spread around the nets and beyond. There were Digg clones galore and Digg itself grew to an impressive 26 million users. Now there’s another Digg clone to add to the list called Sift’d. Although it may be late to the game, Sift’d has some unique features that may make it a formidable competitor. For instance, the way Sift’d’s stories make it to the front page. Like Digg, the most popular stories get more play, but Sift’d’s approach is a bit more democratic. The most popular stories from each section get passed up to the upcoming section. The most popular of those make it to the front page. This way stories from all categories get an equal chance to make it big. Sift’d also allows for more content such as YouTube videos and multiple images to be added at once. Like Digg, you can create a profile, comment, and submit articles. But you can also add some multimedia to you comments. It’s free like Digg, but it’s very much in beta so there’s not a lot of actual content to explore. Yet.

“Please note: Sift'd has only just entered beta. More content will appear as people join and submit stuff. Sift'd is a place to submit and vote on cool stuff you find on the internet. The most popular stuff as decided by the users gets put on the front page of each section, and the most popular of the popular gets featured on the home page!”

It may look and feel like Digg, but Sift’d has a lot of functionality that Digg doesn’t. It’s algorithm for getting the hottest stories, for example allows news from all spheres to dominate so that not just one category wins. You can submit more multimedia content at once and you can rank comments as well as news.

Will Digg appreciate the borrowing of its design and look? Will Sift’d attract some tired Digg users? Is it a viable competitor?