Last night Digg launched several new changes to their site with the biggest change being new user profiles.

Last week, Netscape posted an announcement that they were calling it quits with their "Digg-Clone" social media site. They said that after a study, they found that people didn't associate the Netscape brand with socially controlled news, therefore they were moving on. They also promised though, that their social news site would be around, just not at the Netscape.com domain.

Some of you probably remember the controversy that came last Summer when Netscape launched a social news service which they hoped would compete with Digg.  They even went as far as "bribing" some of the top Digg and Reddit users at the time with $1,000 per month to come over to Netscape and submit at least 150 news stories each month to help build a community.  It's been just over a year now since the service launched, and Netscape is calling it quits.

I’ve been addicted to sidebars ever since I bought my first widescreen monitor. Sidebars have the ability to provide a lot of information inside a very small space, and it wasn’t until recently that I fully started to utilize them.

Like many of you, I use bookmarklets on a daily basis to complete tasks a bit faster. Many of them offer features that normally require Firefox extensions to do, and I am one of those people that try to minimize the number of extensions I use.

There is a cool Firefox extension available called Mr. Uptime. With it you can monitor sites that are currently not available, and it will notify you when the site is back up and running. I’m guessing that this is going to appeal the most to the Digg crowd since they constantly encounter sites that collapse under heavy load.

Slashdot is summoning everyone for a new service that they have dubbed Firehose. The service has some strong similarities to social news site Digg, but at the same time they also have some unique features. Firehose is basically a hub where the user-submitted stories appear for others to vote on, and as more people vote on them they start to move up the color spectrum.

Need a way to waste some time today? Checkout Fichey. It just launched and it serves as a way for you to browse through sites that are currently popular. You can also browse through sites that were popular previously by selecting a date on their calendar.

One of my biggest pet-peeves with Digg’s RSS feed is that they do not include a link to the original source. You have to click on the link to the news item on Digg, and then from Digg, click to view the original article. This problem has been solved for me with the use of DiggRess – an alternative RSS feed for Digg.

The Digg community has been known to throw a fit when other sites have implemented a “Digg-like” interface. They threw temper tantrums and rattled off obscenities when Yahoo launched their “Digg-like” suggestion site. They’ve done the same countless other times, but now they’ve turned on their very own Digg.