29 Super Awesome Tools Built on the Digg API

Ever since Digg opened its API, talented programmers have built a ton of tools that utilize Digg. Some of these tools monitor upcoming and popular stories. Others tell you about your account statistics and your circle of friends. Yet others allow users to browse stories, videos, and pictures in very unique and flashy ways. Here are twenty-nine tools, with some being lesser known than others, but all of them having some pretty significant purpose in the life of a Digger.

1. diggwatcher is a simple application built in Flash that runs in the background and monitors a single Digg story of your choosing. You can receive sound alerts when you get new Diggs, comments, and when your story becomes popular. The script refreshes every 60 seconds.

2. The Digg Noise Filter is a tool that will let you watch upcoming stories before they become popular… that’s if you don’t want to use the regular Digg upcoming tool. (Developed by Russ Jones)

3. Digg Entourage was also developed by Russ Jones and shows you who is in your Digg social circle by avatar and also in table format (number of stories Dugg, percentage of stories Dugg, and whether they’re your friend or fan):

4. Digg comment viewer lets you see your recent Digg comments, their rankings, and you can easily navigate to your friends’ comments. You can also have it auto-update every 60 seconds.

5. Digg CommentSpy is based on a similar concept and lets you see the most recent live comments on Digg. (Developed by Alex Bosworth)

6. TINC – or Who’s Digging You? is another Alex Bosworth Digg application that lets you see who is digging your stories.

7. Digg Charts shows the most popular stories in a table format, followed by a pie graph format and a graph that shows the progression of story popularity over time.

8. Digg Alerter is a great tool for Windows users that sits in the system tray and informs you about your most recent Digg submissions (or those of another user). You can see if your submission was popular or if it’s still “upcoming.”

First, you can choose your desired username:

Then, you can see (and hear) the tool in action when there’s activity on your recent submissions:

9. Digg Wordweb allows users to visualize the most popular keywords in a Digg submission and related stories.

10. Digg Expose displays thumbnails of all recently Dugg stories:

11. DiggCity allows you to view the most recently popular 10 stories in a city format. Each stick figure represents a Digg user and the buildings grow as more people Digg the stories and run into the buildings. If you keep this running for awhile, you’ll have very tall buildings.

12. Smart Digg Button is an excellent Firefox extension that adds a “Digg This” button to the bottom of your browser when the story has not been submitted. If the story has been submitted, you will see how many Diggs it has. This is a great and handy tool for those of us who submit a story only to find out that it’s already been submitted. For those of us looking for high quality stories to submit, this button is a huge timesaver and I wish I picked it up earlier.

This is what it looks like when you still have yet to submit the site to Digg:

And this is what happens once you do:

13. Digg Pics addresses the problem that Digg has as it is still lacking a picture section. Cadu de Castro Alves created this to let you filter through promoted or upcoming stories that include (and are labeled with) pictures.

14. Diggtris is a Tetris game based on recently dugg stories. It’s actually quite fun and addictive, though what’s up with those crazy shapes?!

15. Duggback is a tool that allows you to view cached copies of pages of Digg stories that may have been taken down due to the Digg effect.

16. What about widgets? Diggest allows you to integrate Digg into your own blog or website by taking videos off of Digg and putting them into a continuous channel.

17. Similarly, the same author has built the Digg widget that shows the recent popular stories in a widget that you can put on your site.

18. Which Stories are Popular on Digg? shows which domains are most popular on Digg. While it could be more useful if it listed the domains in order of popularity, nonetheless, it’s a pretty cool list.

MANY OF my favorite Digg tools were built by Brian Shaler. I happen to know that he still has more Digg applications up his sleeve, but here are his Digg applications as of late:

19. Wheel of Upcoming is Brian’s Digg API contest entry. It allows you to visualize the upcoming stories in a particular topic and you can then spin the wheel to see each story’s details.

First, select a topic:

Then, spin the wheel and mouse over the story:

20. Digg Heat Map allows you to visualize the Digg community as a universe with the most popular Digg members appearing to be bright stars in the sky and the newest members to be in the center of the universe. You can choose a username and then see how many friends and fans the user has.

21. Digg Friends Venn Diagram allows you to see who has befriended a particular user of your choosing, who the user has befriended, and mutual friends in a Venn diagram display:

22. Digg Radar is yet another supercool Brian Shaler creation that allows you to envision the Digg community like a universe, with the newest members at the corners of the galaxy and the oldest members in the center of the galaxy. As thumbs-ups appear, you can mouse over them to see which users have been most recently active on Digg and who have Dugg a story.

23. The Map of Digg Friendship was the original concept that turned into Digg Radar. It allows you to see the number of friends and fans that you have and where you are located on the Digg map, with the oldest members being placed in the center of the galaxy.

24. Digg Status allows you to view different statistics for a particular Digg user. I chose one of the oldest Digg users for sake of illustration. Statistics include age of account, total stories Dugg, average number of stories Dugg per month, total stories commented on (as well as a monthly average), total stories submitted (and monthly average), stories promoted to the front page, number of profile views, number of friends, and number of fans.

Some Digg tools require Apollo from Adobe. Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these applications do not run under the newest version of Apollo (air_b1_win_061107.exe), so you can try downloading AIR Alpha instead. These applications are:

25. DiggGraphr Desktop: A desktop installation that will show you Digg stories in treemap format. Each section is color-coded and you can drill down and see stories that would interest you the most (e.g. Tech News, Gadgets, etc.) There happens to be a live DiggGraphr too. (Developed by Arpit Mathur)

26. D’Lite is a “miniature” version of Digg, where you can view recent popular Diggs, its description, the submitter, the number of comments, and the number of Diggs, among other very cool information.

27. Digg Watch is also a mini Digg, allowing you to view recently popular stories and see when the story was submitted/promoted and the number of Diggs/comments it has.

28. Mini Digg is a pretty cool application that shows both Digg newly popular stories, which you can filter by section, and a tracker for particular users to see their activity in Diggs and comments.

This is what the reader looks like:

This is what the tracker looks like:

(As you can tell, I Digg a lot of stories, and I comment a little bit too.)

29. Digg Top is another Adobe AIR application (though it works with the beta version of AIR, not the alpha version as linked earlier in this article). It allows you to see newly popular stories in a variety of formats. One of the better features is the ability to load pics.

You can select the representation of the Digg sections you would like to view:

All News is displayed below. My screenshot includes me performing a mouseover so that it shows the full length of the headline for another story.

If you want to see the image within the application, just click “Load Image” and here you go:

And you can also watch videos in the built-in player:

That’s all. Twenty-nine Digg API applications… for now. I’m sure I’ll have more to report on later. If you know of any others, please add them to the comments! 🙂