Mashable is reporting that Digg founder Kevin Rose mapped out some plans for the next 6-12 months of Digg during a video address at TheNextWeb Conference. The details? Well the much requested ‘Pictures’ section appears to be coming, but also coming are some less obvious and potentially questionable features.

The latter features, including a restaurant review section and product review section, do not seem like things Diggers will go for at all. As Pete Cashmore points out in the Mashable article, users of the site have been reluctant to expand beyond the traditional tech news model – and while ‘Videos’ and ‘Politics’ seem to work, sections like ‘Sports’ are left largely untouched.

Cashmore also (rightly) points out that Digg is probably looking into these areas in an attempt to move beyond the somewhat limited tech news field and expand its brand. Upon seeing what Facebook is doing, Kevin Rose is likely thinking the time is right to think big and take risks – especially if your end goal is not be bought out by one of the big boys and instead go it alone.

The problem with this thinking is that Digg is simply a different beast than Facebook. While it was in my opinion very smart to expand beyond just tech news and move into regular mainstream news, I think doing something like restaurant reviews would simply fail to fit the Digg model.

If I were Digg I would be looking into expanding my site not into other realms of the web, but instead into literally other realms – as in Europe and Asia. Yes, Digg has users in other countries, but the fact that the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, and one of the latest Digg rip-offs, Yigg, are trying (and seemingly succeeding) to copy Digg’s success in these other regions of the world should show you that there is alot of opportunity out there that Digg has not taken advantage of.

I am excited about the possibility of a more personalized Digg though. As everyone knows the frontpage is pretty much all that matters on Digg right now, whether they like it or not, and that is increasingly becoming the home of the big stories in tech hours after I’ve read them on my RSS reader. I want Digg to serve the purpose it used to serve for me, finding me new, interesting things – the content is probably there, I just don’t have as much time anymore to go out and actively search for it. A personalized Digg would go a long way in fixing that I think.

Should be an interesting next 6-12 months on Digg.