Talk Digger Beta 2.0 is great
Some time ago, I blogged to ya about Talk Digger. Frédérick Giasson’s has improved the service and released Talk Digger 2.0, and let me tell you: this is a Web app you should know about. Talk Digger is the simplest way to understand, in a single view, the activity on the Web surrounding a given URL.
Fred’s a tireless developer and a really smart guy. I’m not sure how I stumbled onto his blog, but I’m glad I did. What exactly is Talk Digger, you might wonder? Pretty simple in concept:
- Return results from multiple search engines about a given URL
- Do it asynchronously (AJAX)
- Make the results “diggable” in multiple ways (simple form submission, bookmarklet, or RSS feed)
- Provide some basic options about the search behavior (Best practice: Check the box to “Exclude results with the same domain name.”)
I gave him a bit of feedback on the alpha version of Talk Digger 2.0. We both liked the idea of incorporating PageRank into Talk Digger, especially an indicator of the worth of an incoming link, and PR is now an integral design component of Talk Digger.
I’m still getting used to using Talk Digger as part of my normal Web usage patterns, but I hope to be able to give Frédérick some more feedback soon. I encourage you to become a regular user and provide him feedback, too. At this moment, Talk Digger is a service that’s way too cool for the amount of usage it gets and notoriety it has; I suspect that in a few short months, it will be much better known, so you might as well get in early!
December 30th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Hi Tom,
Thanks for this great review, I really appreciate it. The ideas you give me for that new version were fantastic: people use and like them!
I hope that Talk Digger becomes more know too; however a constant increase of users is better than a Bubble/Crunch one. In fact it gives me the time to adapt the infrastructure. However, since 2 weeks I double the number of unique users per day (from about 500 to 1000-1200). It is modest but it is increasing, so it gives me the power to continue. As long as the word spread on the Internet, it will continue to grow I think.
BTW, I am working on a new feature requested by a Marketing/PR worker. It is mostly finished; I will try to make it public tomorrow if I have the time.
So, thanks for everything Tom and have a happy new year!
Salutations,
Fred