The Great Tool Discrepancy

While reading an article on Mashable about the new Digg, I noticed an interesting statement. It seems that Austin Kucher only has 4000 followers on Digg compared to the over 5 million he has on Twitter. Is this a surprise?

Digg is making an effort to increase the clout of its SUL (suggested user list) by recruiting big corporates and celebrities to enroll on Digg to attract a bigger audience. But is Digg really the place where people who follow Kucher on Twitter really want to go to see stuff he recommends? If he finds something interesting, doesn't he just tweet it out anyway?

I read Mashable's top ten Twitter trends every week and always feel a little deflated to notice I very rarely, if ever, follow any of the trends. Even though I use Twitter faithfully, it's not to see what Justin Bieber is up to. I don't see Digg turning into another Twitter in that regard.

It seems Digg has evidently failed at doing what it originally set out to do, so now it is reinventing itself to be a more culturally relevant and trendy service. Well, that's okay. I think that pop culture and news can reside together. Look at YouTube and Twitter. I am curious, however, if this is what a service like Digg has to do to compete? After all, we do have AllTop, StumbleUpon,and others  that are cousins to Digg.

So I am wondering how Digg is going to differentiate itself? Tools have different cultures, and some are multicultural. Twitter has many uses and many audiences. It is one of the only places on earth where everyday people like me can actually get a window on Austin Kucher's life, if that's what you want. Twitter is the Entertainment Tonight of the social media world, but it is also developing into a huge news stream for people like me who are on there mining good online articles from people like Liz Strauss, Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, Brian Solis and others. Twitter serves a broad range of people and functions. I am anxious to see what happens to Digg.