Friday, September 19, 2008

Digg Bannings: Interview with Diggboss

With me today is a popular former Digg user, Diggboss. Thanks for joining me, Diggboss. Ok, let’s get right into it:

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. When did you start getting into social media in the first place, and which network did you like the most from the start?

2. When did you first discover Digg, and what were your impressions of it back then? How do you think it has been in its progression and dealing with growth, enhancements, and issues?

Answer to 1 and 2 above -

Thanks for having me and giving me a chance to talk to you. I am a Freelance programmer. I specialize in Data Extraction services and writing web-robots or spiders as they are called. Hence the spider avatar.

My first exposure to social media was through digg.com. I didn’t know then that Digg was a “social media site.” I absolutely loved and still love Digg, I am not active on any other social media site other than Digg, i created accounts on Reddit, SU, etc but never found them as interesting as digg. I still don’t even have a MySpace or FaceBook account.

I guess I started from mid 2006, reading news and interesting geeky stuff on digg.com. I became an active Digg member since April 2007.

3. Although Digg has issues with your scripts as you have noted on your site (http://checkfriends.appspot.com/), any plans for creating scripts for other social media sites?

I am not into any other social media site as much as I was in Digg, I do use Plurk and Twitter sometime for micro-blogging but only rarely. So there are no plans for any scripts on any other site.

4. Had you kept your Digg scripts secret, only for personal use, would Digg have caught on you?

I could have kept it a secret but I thought it was a benefit to other Digg users so I wanted to share it. I had no idea it was going to end up like this.

5. Do you feel that your scripts had proper disclaimers on yours scripts? Remember that many Digg users probably don’t understand what goes into a script, API calls and the like. Do you feel upset that many people were just booted, assuming that the reason was due to your scripts?

My scripts used Digg APIs. Anyone can use Digg APIs. Digg data is open under Creative Commons.

Source : NowSourcing

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