Twitter exists solely for people to answer the question "What are you doing?", and its users have been answering that question thousands of times per day since it launched. In an effort to find out what exactly Twitter's users are doing, I checked a sample of 500,000 tweets to see what the most common "-ing" verbs were. Listed below are my findings: the 101 most common actions and the number of times they appeared in the 500,000 messages.

Some interesting observations: "going" beats "coming", "sitting" tops "standing", "listening" outranks "talking", "downloading" wins out over "uploading", and in the feel-good story of the year, "loving" (#53) reigns supreme over "fighting" (#93).

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/07/04

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

Everyone who requested a Pownce invite yesterday should have received one from me; if you didn't, let me know, and I'll resend it. Moreover, I've determined how to obtain an infinite number of invites, so if you still want one, let me know in the comments.

Again, here I am on Pownce. So far, I haven't found much value added in using Pownce over Twitter. Twitter may only do one thing, but it's dead-simple. Pownce does more, but the added features (sending links, sending events, sending files) clutter what should be a clean interface.

Twitter is so intuitive since its obvious use is to answer the question "What are you doing right now?" Pownce doesn't display any sort of prompt as to what you're supposed to do with it other than "Send stuff to your friends." I'd recommend that they choose a more specific motto like "Build our userbase large enough so that we can get bought out by Twitter or Jaiku."

I've got some Pownce invites; leave a comment if you want one.

If you're on Pownce, let me know so I can add you as a friend. Here I am on Pownce.

AOL News has undergone a redesign to be more "bloggy" (according to Reuters). Part of this update is that now they're featuring the top stories at Netscape.com under the "User Submitted News" in the left-hand sidebar.

I wouldn't mind that section being a little higher up on the page though, maybe replacing any of the nine (yes, nine) links to stories about Paris Hilton being released from prison...

Digg finally implemented threaded comments yesterday, and the top story on Digg right now is a harsh criticism of the new system. The consensus appears to be that while the new system is a step forward in terms of technical functionality, it's two steps back for usability.

New features on a large community site will always draw complaints from a vocal minority, so Digg may just have to wait a few days for these users to get acclimated to the changes. My personal opinion is that it's definitely a good step to allow for true replies and threading, but the system seems over-engineered. Having to click to see any replies is a poor design choice, and with all the extra borders and headers, the page gets cluttered very quickly.

My unsolicited advice to Digg is to follow Netscape's or Reddit's lead and simplify what you've got. Drop the "click to view replies" links, keep the pagination ("Click to view the next 50 comments"), and get rid of about half of the extra borders and headers that have been added. Do this and you'll get one of your famous "We love Digg for listening to us" frontpage stories, and the deluge of feedback e-mail I'm sure you're getting will slow to a trickle.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/20

In other Digg news, the fatal flaw with some Digg RSS feeds that I first mentioned here exactly 2 months ago still has not been fixed. I had gotten my hopes up since Digg was down for hours the other day, but still no luck.

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/13

If you'd like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

This link to the Navigator 9 download page was submitted to Digg around noon on Tuesday and received 10 diggs over the next 24 hours. A story about a Firefox-based browser release submitted by a top-100 Digger? That sounds like possible front-page material to me - why only 10 diggs? Maybe it's because the story was excluded from Digg's search results: it doesn't appear in results for netscape or navigator. Is it possible that it was buried, and that's why it's not in the regular results?

No, it doesn't appear in the search results for buried stories either. In fact, I can't find it at all by searching on Digg. Has Digg instituted some sort of double secret probation for stories it doesn't want its users finding?

Articles about the release of the Navigator 9 Beta have been all over the Web today. Here are the major ones that I've spotted:

Slashdot: First Peek at Netscape Navigator 9

Fark: Netscape releases a new browser. In other news, Netscape still makes a browser

456 Berea Street: Software Update Day

Pronet Advertising: Netscape Navigator 9 Released - The Social Browser Has Landed

Linux.com: Netscape releases Netscape Navigator 9 beta 1

Download Squad: Netscape Navigator 9 Beta 1 released

Webware: Hands-on with Netscape's new social browser

Mac Daily News: Netscape Navigator 9.0 beta 1 released

Beta News: Netscape Browser Becomes 'Navigator' Again