Well the new Digg is up complete with the promised social aspects. Unfortunately it’s going SO SLOW right now that it’s basically unusable, certainly untestable. Of course Digg has never really been that great with the stable launches…

Anyways from first glance the new features look to be very nicely integrated into the site. I’m looking forward to having a proper profile rather then just a few lines of text saying my name and where I’m from. It also appears I’m going to need a new icon with the larger square icon size (Lord Licorice is all pixelated now).

More to come, if I can actually get the site to reload…

[UPDATE 10:08PM]: Aaaaand they’re back down for maintenance. Oh these Digg launches…

[UPDATE 10:28PM]: Still down. Adam at Mashable managed to get a few quick screenshots and reactions to the new features in though…

[UDPATE 10:36PM]: It’s back up. For now.

[UPDATE 10:53PM]: Things are still a bit too slow and a bit too buggy. Certain features are working, most aren’t – at least not correctly. Recent Activity is completely out of order, profile picture update isn’t working, picture upload IS working, adding links is kind of working, deleting links is not working, links are displaying about half the time…

[UPDATE 2:00AM]: Everything now appears functional and running smoothly. Digg just sent out the email to users announcing the changes. After messing around with the site for the past couple of hours I have to say the changes do seem like good ones.

If this is just the ‘first step’ as Kevin Rose alluded to, Digg is in for a good year – but one thing to definitely note is that if Digg is serious about the social aspect they NEED to make it so that having more friends doesn’t slow down the site experience to a crawl.

I think many diggers have noticed this unfortunate byproduct by now and have trimmed their friend lists accordingly. If Digg wants us to bulk these relationships up again, they need to do something to improve performance, like perhaps removing the ‘friends who dugg this’ green tag which was fairly useless before and now just contains data available a number of other ways.

Maybe the new emphasis on relationships will cut down on the animosity in some comment threads – or maybe it will make it worse. Interesting times lie ahead.