Ever wonder what happened to Digg? Well one of the web’s most notorious ‘failures’ has been reborn. Here’s what we think of the Digg’s new makeover…

On July 12th 2012, from being one of the web’s shiniest stars in 2008 and suffering one of the most notorious downfalls in the late 2010, Digg was torn apart and sold to three different companies in an overall $16 million acquisition.

The domain ‘Digg.com’ was picked up by Betaworks on the cheap. And they’ve just lunched their polished, new version of the abortive, old Digg. But is the makeover only superficial? And is it any good?

Is the new Digg different from its older Version?

It is. First of all the look is fresh and new: While the original Digg was still this year sporting that old, irrelevant surface of early 2000 websites, the new one is sort of Pinterest-like, very sleek and contemporary.

But more importantly its concept has changed: If the previous version was about rating an article’s popularity only inside Digg, – which meant Digg relied on its own power to create agenda –  the new site shows you its popularity around the web – how many shares they got on Facebook and twitter as well as on Digg.

The new concept gives us users a more thorough vision on which articles are becoming viral, they show you how many shares has taken place in each platform and when you scroll down you can see the most shared articles on Digg and a list of articles that the Digg team thinks will become viral in the near future.

Was the operation successful?

Well, who knows? It is still to early to decide… Digg’s power in the past was that it did change the agenda and really was a popularity assessor. If Digg wants to raise again they have to truly realize that their role in the web has changed, they no longer effect agenda but reports how social networks do. So if you want to know which articles are viral at the moment, go to Digg and get the whole picture.