Digg added major upgrades to its news sharing site, which include enhanced user profiles, private messaging, discussion boards, and privacy settings. They are typical features of social network sites, which are now available on Digg. Business Week reported that Digg's intent is to make it easier for users to find others who share their passions by enabling them to form small groups of "friends" and create fuller personal profiles.

Users will thus have the option to send news within their group of friends as instant messages, rather than post them for review by the entire community. There are several reasons for Digg's decision to implement social network features, one of the most important being that the site is being overrun with mainstream internet users (and news), rather than techies who initially made up its community. "Now that nontech stories have exceeded the tech stories," says co-founder Jay Adelson. "The challenge is on us to provide what our community needs."

A major upgrade will be seen in the user profiles, which now allow users to better define their presence and personality on the site. They are now able to post multiple photos, personal interests, biographical information, and links to a member's personal blog, social network profile, or Web page. The information can be controlled by a privacy system which allows the user to tweak how much information he wants publicized and how much can be seen only by friends.

Digg's revamping is not over: in October, it plans to add a section dedicated to images, rather than news. There are allegedly plans to also implement functions which will suggest news and friends based on an user's history.

"There is going to be a section where you will see these suggestions of news items and pictures and videos based on what you have been looking at," said Kevin Rose, Digg's co-founder. "It will find connections—people you constantly agree with and just don't know it."

Late July, Microsoft and Digg.com have signed a deal through which the Redmond giant has become the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on the popular news site. In order to display ads on Digg.com, Microsoft uses its own ad platform, called AdCenter, which is very similar to Google’s AdWords.

Digg has nearly 20 million visitors each month. It was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who is Digg's CEO). They wanted to call the site "Diggnation", but eventually settled for a simpler name: "Digg", because users within the community are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, and thus push them up to the site's front page.