The popular social news community Digg is set to reportedly open up more by restructuring its API to allow both read/write access.

Digg developer Jeff Hodson noted in a recent post, “In forth coming versions of the API, people will be able to not only read data, but also contribute data too.”

Digg was once the top social media site where people would go to find and share news and interesting content. The problem with Digg remains that content that hits the front page of the site could take hours to go through the ranks of other user-submitted stories, and of course, the problem with that is people don’t want old news, they want news in real-time as it breaks.

Digg’s biggest threat now is Twitter, where people can share information in real-time more simply and efficiently than on Digg. The new changes to the Digg API are aimed at driving traffic to the site by allowing developers to build apps. To encourage developers to actually adopt the service, Digg has allowed commercial use of its API, freeing developers of any fees.

URL shortening service bit.ly also presents a significant threat to Digg and other social media sharing sites. The service is now the default URL shortening service on Twitter. The company plans to mine the URLs to create a news service of the most popular URLs being shared across Twitter. The company says it is currently serving more than 2 billion URL clicks per month. Bit.ly most recently raised $2 million in funding to grow the service.

The link sharing service Delicious has now also redesigned its main page with “Fresh Bookmarks” in a move to also push towards real-time information flows. It has pushed “Popular Bookmarks” to a second tab on the main page, which was previously first. The aim here is to put new links (every minute) to the front page that are likely to be more meaningful to people. Delicious has also added Twitter support for people to tweet their bookmarks.