As per their announcement in the Town Hall video last week, Digg has removed the shout feature that was used to promote links across the Digg site. To get into the upper eschalons of Diggdom a network of friends across the site was required. Shouting allowed you to push your Digg links across your network of friends allowing you to promote something that you’re keen on or have a vested interest in seeing high in the rankings.

By removing shouts from Digg and integrating with Twitter and Facebook Digg will be able to pull more visitors in from popular social networking sites, instead of just promoting to the already Digg faithful. It will also mean that the power base that sits with few users at the moment might be spread around a bit more across the flock. Hooking Digg into Twitter and Facebook is a smart move in my opinion as any hotly talked about stories on the social networking services can be translated into Digg hits and links drawing in more traffic and possibly making the service more useful to the uninitiated.

Time will tell what effect this has on the site and whether the social bookmarking site will gain more traffic from a wider audience.

[Via Download Squad]

Tags: digg, facebook, social networking, twitter