Digg, a link aggregator in the Web 2.0 era, Digg is currently given a second chance in his life and is open to buying Pocket, Mozilla’s reading app.
On Thursday, Mozilla announced it would close its pockets on July 8th. Shortly afterwards, Digg’s original owner Kevin Rose, alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, posted to X that his company was interested in getting a Pocket from Mozilla.
Rose tagged both Mozilla and Pocket, saying, “We love pockets with @digg. We’ve taken it on and we’ll continue to support your users for years to come!” The post was further tagged with Peter Rojas, founding partner of Betaworks, who previously founded Gizmodo and Engadget. Currently, it is a new SVP product from Mozilla.
Neither Digg nor Mozilla have responded to requests for comment on the news yet. However, the deal can be interesting as Digg can leverage Pocket’s existing user base to raise interest in renewals. Digg may integrate Pocket’s reading list with Digg, making it easier for users to find and share engaging content directly in News Aggregator. This could provide an initial pipeline to supply news and articles to DIGG while working on growing your user base.
Digg’s comeback is attracting attention as he pairs up with Rose, the original founder of Digg, and Ohanian, who helped create Reddit, a longtime Digg competitor. Digg recently announced that he brought Christian Selig, founder of the third-party Reddit app Apollo, as an advisor. Selig’s Apollo app was one of the best ways to interact with Reddit, but the company blocked access to the app by increasing API pricing to the point it left Selig out of business.
Digg is not the only one who chased the pocket. Medium CEO Tony Stubbrain also explored the pocket purchase in 2023, but says he never heard of it from Mozilla before announcing that the app would be shut down.
“I don’t know what Mozilla is doing, but that’s a bit infuriating,” Stubbleine told TechCrunch. “Pocket software can be easily rebuilt, but it would be difficult to replace some of the integration with the infrastructure on the web.
Updated after publication in a comment from Stubbleine.