CNET and a number of other blogs report that Google may buy social news site Digg for approximately $200 million. This has been something we've been eying for awhile, with Reuters photographing Digg CEO Jay Adelson with Larry Page of Google (as seen in Valleywag). As a former Digg addict myself (with an emphasis on the "former"), I guess I wonder what Jill Whalen wonders on a Sphinn submission: why would they want it?
Many other forum members are a little baffled by this. In my opinion, it is happening way too late. An acquisition last year would have been more beneficial with the dedicated userbase. One forum member calls this another "fascinating toy for Google guys" and that Google is pulling what Microsoft did years ago: they're acquiring without stopping.
Several forum members across many forums, however, say that they thinks Digg could do better than $200 million. Actually, I think Google could do better than $200 million....
Others think that the search engine takeover was a matter of time, especially since Google has been testing voting features within the search engine for some time. But is Digg really profitable? It might be, and that's because they force you to click twice to get to a page you want to vote upon (which was an issue of contention last September when it was implemented -- but they never responded to this -- since they were aiming for the monetary gain).
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint Forums, and Sphinn.
