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As a big fan of Digg.com I’m very pleased that Digg Spy 2.0 was released. The new version includes new features and you can spy (in real-time) on all site-wide activity, all powered by AJAX auto update. It’s very useful if you don’t want to miss Digg updates.

How it works –
After loading, Spy automatically polls digg every few seconds for the latest site- wide activity. The Spy page is then updated via AJAX to show the latest happenings.

Choose what you want to spy on –
In the upper right corner of Spy are four checkboxes. These checkboxes represent the type of activities you can spy on:

The new page icon spies on newly submitted or promoted stories.
The thumbs up icon spies on newly dugg stories.
The thumbs down icon spies on stories as they are being buried/reported.
The message icon spies on new comments posted to a story.

If you deselect any of these icons Spy will stop looking for that type of activity. (Example: deselecting everything but comments (yellow icon) will only spy on new comments)

Digg Spy 2.0 also allows you to spy on different areas. By default you spy on all stories. You can also choose between queued stories and front page stories. Digg queue is the repository for all newly submitted stories so if you want to promote new Digg stories, “spy on queued stories” is your place. Selecting “spy on front page stories” display the current activities of stories promoted in frontpage only.

If stories are updating too fast, you may want to pause. Play and pause controls are located near the colored icons. The pause icon is too small and is easily forgotten by users so take note of that.

New to Digg? Here is a brief introduction from Digg website: Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

Links:
Digg Spy: http://digg.com/spy [ Digg news ]
Digg Blog: Digg Spy 2.0 Released
Digg, Digg spy, AJAX