Ever since Google Reader died, there’s been a tiny part of me that’s always felt hollow. The popular news reading solution was a simple, well-done interface, and served as a nice portal to organise all one’s web reading needs. In a world without Google Reader, though (they pulled the plug on it some time back), other competitors are coming in to gain stronghold of the market. Case in point: Digg.
The once mighty news giant has mostly been reduced to another bystander of the blogosphere explosion. People rarely “digg” stuff on the web nowadays to share it with their communities and pass news or information around. The company, however, is still trying to innovate and stay in the game. They’ve jumped on to the possibility of capturing the news reading space and have launched the clean, free, working-with-Google-accounts service: Digg Reader. They’ve released an app for it on both iOS and Android devices.
Digg Reader comes into a market already teeming with competition and monopolisation. Players like Flipboard, Instapaper and Pocket are already in a fierce struggle to grab people to use their platforms to curate and read their stuff on. Where then, does Digg stand? For starters, they seem to have a simplistic, pared down and neat interface, with good, sensible typography and an emphasis on reading, even on the small screen.
It comes with a lot of portable features. It has the top stories highlights like Flipboard, seamlessly merges with all these other services (thus, it doesn’t forget about its competition), and has some great sorting, organisational and social options. The clean interface is really the killer feature here. I suspect Digg Reader will pick up over time when people realise they don’t have to pay for expensive apps like Instapaper for the same conveniences that they can have for free.