DiggBar

» see digg.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Digg launched the DiggBar on 2 April 2009, into the exact window when Twitter's character limit had made short URLs a real product category and bit.ly was making a business out of it. The mechanism was simple to describe. Put digg.com/ in front of any address and you got a short link back, five or six characters, ready to paste.

The part that caused the trouble was what happened when somebody clicked it. Instead of redirecting, Digg served its own page with an iframe in it and loaded the destination site inside that frame. Across the top sat a Digg-branded bar carrying the story's vote count and its comments. The address bar stayed on digg.com. You could read an entire article on somebody's site while your browser insisted you were on Digg.

For Digg the appeal was obvious: every link shared anywhere on the web became a Digg pageview with Digg controls attached. For everybody whose work was inside the frame, it looked like the framing wars of the late nineties coming back with a modern logo on them, and the reaction was immediate.

Digg spent the next year conceding ground in stages, and then Kevin Rose gave the whole thing up in April 2010, saying the bar would come off with the site's next version. Digg v4 launched on 25 August 2010 without it. That relaunch turned into one of the worst product disasters of the decade for unrelated reasons, and the DiggBar's removal was a footnote inside it.

~ the record ~

~ the status code ~

The technical complaint had a number on it. A normal shortener answers with a 301, a permanent redirect, which tells the browser and every search engine that the real address is somewhere else and hands the destination its traffic and its ranking. The DiggBar answered with a 200, meaning this is the page, it is at digg.com, nothing to forward.

Search marketers understood exactly what that meant for anyone whose links got shortened at volume. Every share of your article accumulated authority at digg.com rather than at your own domain. Digg was not hiding this and did not appear to think it was the objection people were making, which is part of why the fight went on as long as it did.

~ the frame busters ~

John Gruber published blocking code on Daring Fireball within a week of launch. It matched the digg.com referrer pattern and served those visitors a short message where the article should have been. His argument was about addresses rather than about revenue. URLs are the building block of the web and they tell a reader where they are, and the DiggBar broke that.

The snippet was ported into every server-side language anyone was publishing in and spread across the web from there. That is the part worth remembering. A toolbar shipped by one of the largest sites on the internet was met with a distributed technical veto from the people whose pages it was wrapping, and the veto held.

~ the walk-back ~

On 15 April 2009, thirteen days after launch, Digg offered a compromise: the bar would only appear for logged-in Digg users, and everyone else would get a plain redirect. In July it went further and stopped functioning as a general short-URL service at all, a change Kevin Rose himself was publicly unhappy about. By then the digg.com/ shortener had been abandoned by most of the people who had picked it up in April.

When Rose finally announced the retirement on 6 April 2010, the reasoning he gave was the one Gruber had made a year earlier. Framing content in an iframe is bad for the internet, it breaks bookmarking, and iframe busters break it right back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »