The other day, I was thinking about how popular Digg has become over the last couple years and figured others might want to see the evolution of Digg in a series of screenshots (thanks, archive.org). If you’re unfamiliar with Digg, crawl out from under your rock and check out the site or start with the Wikipedia page about Digg.com.

First, lets just start with Alexa’s picture of the Digg’s traffic for the last 3 years:

(click on any screenshot to get the full size)
It seems the domain had some previous owners who couldn’t make something successful from it. Here’s a screenshot from November 11, 1998:

Nearly two years later, the domain surfaced with a new (foreign) look on August 19, 2000:

On February 2nd, 2001, that site got a very slight facelift:

Then came the Digg.com we know and love…

“We started working on developing the site back in October 2004,” Kevin Rose told ZDNet[2] “We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004.”

While I don’t have a screenshot from October of 2004, I managed to find one from December 9, 2004:

… and here’s what the “Top Users” age looked like on that day:

… and the article detail page:

In 2005, Digg got some minor visual changes. Here’s a cap from July 11, 2005:

In 2006, Digg had a nice facelift as you can see from this August 21, 2006 screenshot:

Finally, here’s one from Digg as I saw it it a little over an hour ago:

That was fun… I’ll have to poke around in some other site’s history, too, soon.