The much anticipated interview with various members of the Digg staff team is finally here! We thank the ever busy development team for taking the time to give us some responses.
Q: What’s the best part of working for a young company? Is it the same as an everyday job, or is it more fun to be part of such a highly successful site?
The Digg team is still relatively small, but we are completely focused on developing new features for our users..and yes, it’s a blast to work for a company like Digg because we have such a loyal following and close relationship with the community.
Q: On a hosting / tech specs related question, how do you estimate or determine the amount of bandwidth you’ll need each month to run such a high traffic site?
We grew fairly quickly right out of the gate, so before too long one server became two servers, myisam become innodb, we moved to Debian then we went to three servers, Apache 2.x, mysql master-slave replication, started using memcached, moved to PHP 5.x, hired a dba. And then the pace picked up yet again. We try to account for 1,000 requests per second at high points in the day for traffic.
Q: How likely is it that you will be going strong and still run by the same people in the next 5 – 10 years? Is selling to another company something that you see in the near future?
We just recently closed a 2nd round of funding, and are completely devoted to focusing on growing the site internally into something that will continue to offer users the best social experience on the Net.
Q: What’s it like knowing that everything you do front-end wise is going to have both positive and negative feedback from the hardcore users? Do you take a lot of the feature and design suggestions to heart?
We always listen to the users, and check every email that comes to the feedback address. It might take some time for us to get everything that’s requested rolled out, but that’s because we want to do it right.
Q: How long will it be before the Digg API is released?
Soon, very soon.
Q: Are there any plans for allowing users to register as “owners” of a particular URL (similar to how a user can register as the owner of a blog at technorati) and to allow them to “adjust” poorly chosen (or sometimes blatantly false) titles and descriptions that link to their content?
We don’t have any plans along those lines at this time, but I would add that Digg currently provides users with a variety of tools to report inaccurate content on the site. With these tools, Digg empowers its more than one million users as editors of content on the site.
Q: Care to shed some light on any future plans and what we should be looking out for from Digg in the coming months / year?
Stay tuned. As always, Digg will continue to innovate and offer cool new features. Also, please come out to the Digg user celebration party at Mezzanine in San Francisco on April 19th.
