It seems that Digg is going to try to be a mixture of Facebook and Twitter, putting a stronger emphasis on social features and setting aside the content, making it much less meaningful.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, wrote an open letter to Rose, saying that the new version of Digg is a bad idea:

…this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It’s cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to “give the power back to the people.”

…It’s a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.

2.5 years ago, I stopped using Digg as a regular user. It has become irrelevant and annoying – the stupid inner-politics, the Bury Brigade, the worshiping of Apple to the point of fanaticism and the angry mob mentality of the comments – all of these and more made Digg a place I didn’t want to be in any more. It was about the time when Mixx was getting some good attention, but that didn’t last, either.

Nowadays, I enjoy Reddit and Hacker News. Sure, they both have their problems and annoyances, but they are still FUN, and they manage to bring interesting stories to the front. Reddit and Hacker News are what Digg was supposed to be – great social news sites for the technology-inclined crowd, featuring interesting content. Digg is no longer that kind of site, and reforming it in the shape of Facebook and Twitter isn’t going to make it more appealing.

Pingdom is trying to predict how many tweets will be published by January 2011, bases on the current growth rate of Twitter. And the number they got? 6.7 billion tweets.

By any measure, activity on Twitter is increasing significantly every month. Even if Twitter were to not match the current 16% monthly growth, it would still grow big time. For example, growing 10 percent per month becomes 214% over a year (i.e. the number of tweets would more than triple).

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30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networks via their mobile browser in January 2010 – up 8.3 points from 22.5% one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile grew 112% in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.

In January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112% from the previous year. MySpace attracted 11.4 million users.

It’s not surprising that social networks are popular among mobile users: Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, explains: “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”

Foursquare users beware: the information you tweet regarding your location might be used to reveal when is your house empty – which makes it a great target for a burglary.

To prove a point, a threesome of Dutch fellows set up a Foursquare/Twitter mashup called PleaseRobMe. Here’s what they say about it on their site: “…The way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. Services like Foursquare allow you to fulfill some primeval urge to colonize the planet… The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home”.

The site, which took the developers only 4 hours to set up, shows tweets of Foursquare players, an online game which is based on a person’s location in the real world. By following the updates on the site, anyone can know when certain people are not in their homes, which might make for a break-in opportunity.

“Our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized”, claim the developers of PleaseRobMe. What they want is to show everyone how we are letting our privacy to go down the toilet, without even noticing. Foursquare might be a fun game, but it seems universally stupid to tell the world where you are at any given moment. Someone, someday, might take advantage of it. Mind the information you transmit to the world.