TechCrunch conducted a quick interview with social news site Digg.com founder Kevin Rose backstage during the TechCrunch50 conference. Rose hinted during the interview that a “bigger launch with a completely revamped website [would be coming] a bit later”.

When asked if it was a mistake to startup Pownce, Kevin said it was a mistake not to appoint a CEO to manage the direction of the company where it could have been something big.

Check out the complete interview below where Rose talks about the latest ad voting system on Digg, and questions surrounding intensifying competition from Twitter, his picks at TechCrunch50, among other topics.

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.

Read the full story

Digg will be ending its exclusive advertising partnership with Microsoft after two years, a deal that should have ended mid-2010, according to a Clickz report. The deal is believed to have earned Digg only about $20 million over the last two years. The partnership was initially announced in 2007.

The move comes as Digg shifts to selling its own advertising to maximize revenue.

According to Digg executives, the company will focus on selling customized and standard banner ads to partners. Microsoft will now get whatever ad inventory space is left over. There is speculation Digg could release an AdSense type product, where partners can place contextual CPC advertisements within the Digg news streams. Read the full story

Digg founder Kevin Rose has just launched his latest start-up, We Follow. We Follow is simply a Twitter directory that will help people find others niche Tweeters.

To be included in the directory, you simply tweet “@wefollow #tag1 #tag2 #tag3″, replacing the tags with the category where you want to be included. Some key categories include news, blogger, tech, marketing, blogs, among other categories. Read the full story

Popular social news site Digg.com seems to be developing a browser based toolbar, similar to StumbleUpon’s toolbar. The Digg toolbar apparently lets you Digg or Burry the page you are on, and also tells you how many Diggs the page has already received. The toolbar can also fetch related pages. Now, there are two very interesting features. The Digg toolbar features a shortened URL similar to TinyURL for each page making it easier for you to share stories by Facebook, Twitter, or by Email. The shortened URL includes the Digg prefix with 6 unqiue characters for the page http://digg.com/aaaaaa. This feature alone will pose a significant risk to existing shortening URL services assuming the Digg toolbar is widely adopted. Finally, another significant feature is the large orange Random button found on the right side of the toolbar, which effectively works the same as StumbleUpon by taking you to a random site. I personally think a Digg toolbar is long over due.

Popular social media site Digg.com has announced it will cut 10% of its 75-person headcount. The company is pushing for profitability in 2009 and this is just one way to cut costs.

Hitwise is reporting today that Twitter has passed Digg in the number of weekly unique visitors for the first time ever. Social media sites including Twitter have experienced a surge in traffic over the past week with people flocking to the sites to get more information from big events, including the US Airways Hudson River crash, and the inauguration of Obama. Now, it is important to note this is only for weekly visitors, according to Compete, Digg got almost 35 million visitors in December 2008, while Twitter had only about 4.4 million. Nevertheless, Twitter is certainly surging in popularity.

Yahoo has just announced support for an additional 20 outside of Yahoo networks for people to get updates about their friends. The supported third party sites include Digg, YouTube, Facebook, Picasa, SU, SlideShare, Pandora, SmugMug, Webshots, Blogger, Bloglines, Zooomr, Yelp, Twitter, among others. Yahoo has made it clear the company wants to become more open and social as part of its Open Strategy.