By Kenneth Barbalace

For many Digg.com users, the removal of Digg's shout feature also meant they lost the ability to share articles and communicate privately with their Digg friends. While not an ideal solution, one work around to the loss of the Digg shout feature is to use Twitter.

Create a Twitter profile

To effectively use Twitter, however, you first need to create a Twitter account that uses the same user name as your Digg account and uses the same icon on both Digg and Twitter. This will help friends/followers keep track of who is who on both sites. You should also reference your Digg account on their Twitter profile and link to your Twitter account on their Digg profile. This will help friends/followers know that both accounts really are really the same person. Linking to your Twitter account from Digg will also help new Digg friends quickly find your Twitter profile. If you already have a Twitter account that has a different username from your Digg account, at least use the same icon for both accounts and cross reference them.

Tweeting effectively in 140 characters

One challenge with Twitter is that it only allows for 140 characters per "tweet"; as such, long web addresses can pose a challenge. The most common work around to this problem is to use a website that will create very short web address aliases. The site I tend to use is http://bit.ly/ because its aliased web addresses tend to be less than 20 characters in length. When tweeting an article try to use a short concise description followed by a shortened link to the original article then the comment "on #Digg" and a shortened link to the Digg thread so that Digg friends can easily Digg and comment on the article. For Example:

Effectively sharing articles with Digg friends via Twitter http://bit.ly/21aA6 on #Digg http://bit.ly/Sp06i

Don't use the Digg bar!

I know that Digg has their own link shortening feature that frames articles in a "Digg bar" but don't use it. Framing sites the way the Digg bar does is considered bad netiquette (bad Internet etiquette). The idea of framing other people's sites with one's own stuff was first introduced in the 1990s, and was fought against back then as bad netiquette when it was first introduced. Much of the revolt against framing stemmed from the fact that search engines, etc. that were framing other sites were also trying to slip ads into their frames and the frames were confusing users into thinking there was an association between the two sites. Others problem with frames is that they can trap the user in the frame and users can not see the actual web address of the website being visited. This means that when they go to share the article they are reading, they actually end up linking to the site doing the framing and not the site that contains the actual article. Also keep in mind that Digg does provide an option for users to turn off the Digg bar via one's profile settings so if you send tweets with Digg bar links your friends with the Digg bar disabled will be unable to Digg your articles. To combat framing, many sites actually implemented measures to break out of such frames (like our main site does).

Yes having to create two links in Tweets is inconvenient compared to the Digg bar, but if you want your followers to actually Digg your articles, you need to make your tweets as user friendly to ALL of your followers as possible. This is also nicer for your Twitter followers who might not be Digg users.

Digg should be absolutely ashamed of itself for framing sites with their Digg bar, it is very poor netiquette. I'd strongly encourage folks to turn off the Digg bar via their Digg profile.

Why the # marks?

Oftentimes tweets will contain words with # marks in front of them (e.g. #eco, #Digg, etc.). These are for yet another social networking site called Twibes, which allows folks to subscribe to specific interest groups that aggregate tweets based on subject matter. For instance, #eco is for the Twibe group "Green" (http://www.twibes.com/group/GREEN).

Summary

Digg shouts are dead to this dismay of many, but it is possible to still effectively share articles with your Digg friends if you can get them to also join Twitter and you are effective with the way you tweet. Just remember to use clear concise descriptions; provide links to both the original article as well as the Digg thread; and don't rely on the Digg bar.

By Kenneth Barbalace

Like so many folks on the Internet I have been building up social networks on various social networking sites. One of my favorite haunts is Digg. I like Digg because it is oftentimes a good way to find news articles and blog posts on issues I am interested in (progressive politics and environmental issues).

Many of the articles I read there are shouted to me by the "friends" I have built up in my Digg network. There is only so many articles I can read in a day so being able to find the most interesting articles quickly is important. The way the Digg system works is that folks can "shout" articles to each other or digg/vote articles up or down. Articles that reach some secret digg threshold get promoted to the front pages of their respective sections and or the main page. These are basically like the main pages of some online newspaper but the editorial decisions as to what made it to the front was democratically handled via the reader base voting on articles. As a result I can quickly find articles of interest from a wide variety of sources.

While these social networks are great things, their users are at the whims of the social networks' moderators and admins arbitrarily enforcing rules. This past weekend, some of my favorite "friends" to follow on Digg got banned as a result of a hit job done to them by their political opponents (Read more here). On Digg, as with any social network, certain terms of service rules are poorly thought out and easily violated due to the way certain features are designed. As a result these conditions are routinely violated by the social network's user base and very unevenly enforced. In this case political opponents set out hits on certain really vocal Digg members who were popular and had good track records of submitting political articles that made it to the front pages of Digg. These opponents laid in wait for the slightest infraction of DIGG's TOS and then colluded to file so many complaints on the infractions that the target of the hits ended up getting banned (it is unclear whether this was automated bans or moderator intervention).

There are some lessons to be taken from this by both the users of social networking sites and the maintainers of social networking sites.

1. As a user don't depend on a single social network as the sole point of contact for your most important friends. Make sure to connect with them via different networks (e.g. Twitter and Blogger in addition to Digg). This way if something happens to either you or your friends on a specific network, you can still keep in contact elsewhere.
   
2. Maintainers of social networks need to put more thought into their terms of service and not create rules that are impossible to enforce and exceedingly easy to violate. If a certain feature is designed such that in invites the violation of the TOS then maybe the feature needs to be redesigned or the TOS needs to be reworded.
3. Maintainers of social need to be very careful about how they enforce certain rules such that the rules don't become weapons used by certain groups to silence their opponents as happened in this case.
   
4. If a rule is constantly getting violated as the result of a certain feature then look at whether it is the rule or the feature that needs to be redesigned to eliminate the violations.