About a month ago, Digg CEO Jay Adelson stepped down, and Founder Kevin Rose stepped in to take his place. It didn’t take long – the next day in fact – for Rose to begin making some changes.
Digg announced it was dropping the DiggBar – the company’s iFrame toolbar that was the subject of a fair amount of webmaster controversy. Part of the DiggBar’s functionality was to shorten URLs with Digg’s own shortening tool, for any site on the web.
Now Digg is doing away its URL-shortening for the web. That is unless it is a story that has been submitted to Digg. Starting May 17th, this will be the case.
"Users will continue to be able to share their favorite Digg stories by generating a short URL via the ‘Share’ button," says Digg’s Keval Desai. "However, it will not be possible to generate a short URL for a web URL that does not refer to a submitted story on Digg. The ‘shorturl.create’ method in Digg API will be deprecated as of that date. Previously generated Digg short URLs will continue to operate beyond this date."
Clearly Digg isn’t interested in competing for any kind of URL-shortening dominance. It’s more than happy to let you use bit.ly and all the rest. In fact, the company is even directing users to this big list of such services.