Recently, Digg announced that its little known feature “Digg Spy” is being killed. I am deeply saddened, as this was one of those “gee whiz” features that shone a light into what the future of Web 2.0 could look like (check out Max Kiesler’s capture for a glimpse at the past).  Created in 2005, it was a real time view of the posts flowing through digg’s servers challenging your ability to speed read as the webpage scrolled itself – essentially acting like a stock ticker for digg posts. It’s being replaced by something called “BigSpy,” which is a similar idea but with the look and feel of blogging tags, or specifically a tag cloud. 

BigSpy is a good visualization of the data, and with the black/grey color scheme very nerd-cool; however BigSpy lacks in a few key areas compared to the old Digg Spy feature.  Namely, it’s missing the who (naming the users digging or burying stories) and the where (the raw URLs).  When Digg takes away these tools, they limit the ability of the digg community to regulate themselves.  They also limit my ability to easily find new stories that are “just posted” by newbie users – these may be the jewels that are being ignored by the masses, but that I might find interesting.  That was the beauty of Digg originally: that the users generated their own content and you could tap that content to find the pulse of the crowd.