Look, Mom, we made a verb!
It’s been a wild couple of weeks. Time magazine included me in their annual TIME 100 list this year. While an extraordinary honor, it’s always a bit strange to find yourself on list like that. Last week, Digg won a Webby People’s Voice Award. And this week, Sarah Lacy is releasing her new book in which Kevin and I are among the wacky cast of characters. It’s even more startling to see yourself portrayed in a book, although so much has happened at Digg since we first started speaking with Sarah a couple of years ago. She actually finished talking to us for the book such a long time ago that it’s interesting to see her perspective from that snapshot in time.
In any case, with all of these recent events, it got me thinking about entrepreneurship and how far Digg has come in such a very short time.
It was only two years ago that Digg had a team of only fifteen people. Back then, we were still very focused on technology news, though we already had plans (from the very beginning) to launch V3 and expand beyond to other content and media types, which we did shortly after we started talking to Sarah in July of 2006.
Today, Digg’s community of users has grown to around 26 million unique visitors a month. Technology is still an important and growing section, though we’ve added a wide range of other topics including World & Business, Offbeat, and Lifestyle, and you can now submit news stories, videos and images – pretty much any type of content with a URL…and there is more coming!
We’ve developed a range of new tools, including widgets/gadgets, and personalization and customization tools. Another thing we’ve done since then was to open up our API, which makes it possible for third-party developers to create applications based on the Digg platform. Soon we’ll be rolling out our new recommendation engine, which will add a new dynamic to the way people discover interesting things on the Web (and allow our users to better sift through our daily submissions, which now number greater than 15,000). And the Digg crew is now over sixty people strong!
Yet, while we’ve made tremendous progress, we have completed only a fraction of our vision for Digg. With each day, as more features are added, and as more people use Digg, Digg becomes more valuable as a way to discover and share content from anywhere on the Web, and every day, Kevin and the community come up with bigger ideas for how to apply Digg in new ways.
We’re pumped. We’re extremely psyched about the opportunities that lie ahead. Our only constraint is our ability to implement the new ideas as quickly as we can devise them. That should start to improve as we hire more smart, motivated people and take care of some long-over-due infrastructure enhancements that we’ve been implementing this year.
What has always fascinated me about Digg is how it changes the way we consume information. It does so by leveling the media playing field and by contributing to the democratization of media and information, a concept I’ve talked about in the past.
It’s true, my family has been and always will be a priority for me, though there has never been a conflict between their needs and my running of Digg. My wife Brenda and my kids, Rowan, Ben and Lisa, have all supported my effort to see Digg reach its full potential. They know that in addition to being a father, Digg gives me a tremendous sense of purpose and motivates me. I know this to be true for Kevin and many others on the Digg team, too.
And so, it is great to see that the word “Digg” is beginning to become a verb in the English lexicon. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next few years bring.
Jay
P.S. Digg is always looking for amazing and cool people. So send us your resume – we’re hiring!
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