Digg's long awaited recommendation engine is now live for some users, which luckily includes me. It's time to take a look at what this new feature brings to the individual user as well as Digg community as a whole. The reason I'm dividing these two categories is the fact that recommendation engines of any kind never really did it for me, and I can tell you at once that this one is no different.
The feature is simple: click on Recommendations and you get a bunch of stories that other users with similar "taste" like you have dugg. You can sort them by most matches, most diggs, or you can simple view the most recently recommended stories. On the right hand side, you can see the users whose interests are most similar to you (obviously I'm not very similar to anyone, because the best I got is 11%).
What's much more important than individual users' personal preferences is: is this feature going to improve the general quality of the front page stories on Digg? Will it level the playing field for less "famous" users? At this point, it's hard to say, but I'll go out on a limb here and predict that it won't.
What I see happening is users befriending other users similar to them, and more friendly digging back and forth, but since this will happen equally for all stories, it probably won't change anything in Digg's grand scheme of things. In a way, it goes against Digg's previous efforts of constantly diminishing the influence of friendly digging (by which I mean diggers having a lot of friends who digg everything they submit), since your recommended users aren't that different from your friends. Therefore, it might take some more tweaking of Digg's infamous algorithm to achieve the desired effect - whatever it may be.