As I've talked about at a few conferences recently, one of the exciting/difficult things about working in-house, on a project with the scope of something like Digg, is the luxury/challenge to adapt your own work. The comments system on Digg is a perfect example. Just this past week, we rolled out the latest iteration of the comments system, which is the fourth major adaption of the system since the site launched over four years ago. It's a project that's been a long time coming and has been under development for a fairly long period. What a relief to finally see it out in the wild.

In his blog post about the release, Micah described several of the important changes that we made from both a design and performance standpoint. From the design side, we've made the comments visually lighter, reduced the metadata around each comment, improved the visual flow down the comment threads, added subtler functionality, and significantly improved the interaction design. When I say we improved the interaction design, I mean that as you interact with the comments (e.g. digg a comment, write a comment, edit your comments, etc) all of the pieces fit together more naturally.

The next step will be to iterate on the comments system once we've seen how people use, abuse, and break the one we just built. We certainly plan on doing more small adaptations over the next months as opposed to waiting to perform a large revision. As always with Digg projects, it's pretty exciting to watch a few million people use a feature that, up until launch, had only been seen or used by a few people... it'll be interesting to see what they do.