Make up your own opinion, if you give a shit

18 months ago, Digg introduced the DiggBar, its controversial tool that allowed users to Digg, favorite or share an article without leaving the site. It was introduced along with Digg’s then-new URL shortener, which used the digg,com domain.

The DiggBar created a great deal of controversy because of the way it worked, which was to display an iframe over the page itself, displaying the Digg buttons, logos, etc. over the content. This meant that the content appeared to be hosted on the Digg domain, unlike with other URL shorteners, the link was not simply redirected to the source.

This led to accusations of content theft against the DiggBar. Especially worrisome was the potential search engine implications as, at least theoretically, Google and others would not be able to see where the source of the content was and may rank the Digg URL above the original.

Initially Digg defended its product, saying that it wasn’t evil and that they had taken steps to mitigate against the SEO issues. However, a week after that they relented on several key issues, including having the URL simply redirect for non-logged in users.

Controversy once again arose a few months later when Digg, without warning, changed the way the URLs worked to redirect the short URLs to Digg’s landing page and not the source, this led to accusations of hijacking.

The latter issue was undone after Rose returned from vacation, he had said he was gone when the change was made, indicating that the two may have disagreed over the DiggBar and its place, thus making it one of Rose’s top priorities after taking over the CEO position.

Since then, the DiggBar has remained largely unchanged, until April’s announcement that they were Axing the entire product.

Source: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/04/07/diggbar-to-be-killed/