Digg Launches New Toolbar - Makes Digging and Sharing Easier

Digg, the popular social news site, just launched its long awaited DiggBar, a new toolbar that will appear on any page Digg links to. From within the toolbar, users can digg stories and share them with their friends on Twitter and Facebook. Digg will now also feature shortened URLs, and, maybe even more interestingly, Digg now also displays how many times a story has been clicked through from Digg.

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

How to Get It

If you want to see the DiggBar in action, all you have to do is enter "digg.com/" in front of any URL, and the toolbar will automatically appear at the top of the page. Or, you can use our own DiggBar bookmarklet. Instructions for setting it up are at the end of this post.

More Features

The toolbar also features a prominent 'Random' button, that will, as the name implies, take you to a random page with a similar story that was popular on Digg in the last few days. This, of course, is very similar to what StumbleUpon does.

All of this, of course, will help to make Digg an even stickier site, as users will never quite leave the Digg experience behind, but at the same time, as MG Siegler points out on VentureBeat, this also shifts Digg's focus away from its own site, and turns Digg into a service.

Sadly, Digg didn't provide users with a bookmarklet that would make it easy to quickly invoke the DiggBar without having to edit the URL, but our own Rick Turoczy just wrote up a bookmarklet for us - you just have to drag and drop this link to your bookmarks: digg bar.

After that, clicking on the link will invoke the DiggBar for any site you are currently visiting.