[UPDATE]: Earlier today (Tues., 21 July), Jay Adelson posted an official statement on Digg’s blog detailing the company’s position on the diggbar issue. It reads as follows:

Hey everyone,

I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.

Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.

As always, keep the feedback coming as we continue to think about ways to enhance the user experience and evolve the product.

Thanks,

Jay

While it’s unfortunate that Digg is sticking with the decision made last week, they’ve at least reversed the effect on the countless links that were floated before the change.

Earlier Updates:

[UPDATE]: Mashable reports that Digg has in fact responded to our collective accusations of “bait and switch” tactics. JD Rucker, who posted this morning about this, contacted Digg. This is the conversation that transpired:

JD: Not sure if this is a mistake or something that was planned, but it appears that when people who aren’t logged into Digg click on Diggbar links, they are now taken to the Digg page and not the source. Are you aware of this? Is it going to be fixed? Thanks!

Digg: Hi from Digg,

Thank you for writing us about this matter. This is working as intended. Please let us know if you have any feedback or have additional questions we can assist you with.

Digg Support

No Longer a URL Shortener:

Nick Halstead, CEO of TweetMeme, commented on the above Mashable post that:

From TweetMeme’s point of view if this stays the same way we will be forced to remove it from our whitelist of shorteners, as by definition this no longer makes Digg a shortening service. We included Digg.com because we felt the addition allowed users the ability to gain extra traction along with the shortening support.

That’s serious. If other sites follow TweetMeme’s lead and remove Digg’s URL from their whitelists, the diggbar will have become illegitimate and Digg will have suffered a much more considerable black eye to its reputation than some angry blogging twitterers can inflict. Digg should realize it’s not the only kid on the block. There are many other heavy-hitters in social-media and the social-bookmarking competition is already fierce; if they start making enemies out of friends they’ll find themselves out of a market very quickly.

[UPDATE]: Social News Watch reports that Kevin Rose has just confirmed Digg’s intentions regarding the diggbar and its recent changes. In an interview on TWiT Live, Leo Laporte asked Rose what he had to say about the issue, (the good stuff starts at about 11.26 in the video):

(Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)

Laporte: Is that true?

Rose: That’s a good question.

Laporte: You don’t know?

Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.

Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…

Rose: Correct.

A flimsy answer at best from Digg’s frontman. Regardless of his convictions on the subject, it sounds like Digg’s sticking to their guns and not about to show any remorse, either.

Orignal Post: Digg Changes the “DiggBar” Short-URL Service

Digg has seen fit to change the way their short-url “diggbar” operates. This change was in the last couple of days sometime, though when exactly that is, I cannot be sure. People haven’t been notifying twitterers until recently.

Non-Digg users who click a digg.com/****** style link will now no longer be taken to a site housing content, but will instead be taken directly to Digg’s own page containing a link to that site.

I will no longer be using digg.com urls for sharing links over twitter or any other service.

[UPDATE] You can see my comment at Social News Watch that has been posted in their article on the story, which goes into great detail about the discovery of the change.

This is disturbing in two major ways:

The purpose of this shift is clear, Digg wants more direct traffic, to generate more ad-revenue. When the diggbar was first released there was open revolt over the way Digg implemented it, causing them to update the tool in deference to the vast majority of people on the Internet who not only want nothing to do with Digg, but also prefer that their visit count as traffic for the site they actually visited and not for Digg itself.

Now Digg’s effectively reversed their position, and instead of simply being plagued by a badly coded, forced-frame toolbar, people wishing to visit sites via digg links will now be going straight to Digg.com instead. This is nothing more than dirty, back-alley behavior.

The more disturbing part is that they’re expecting us to use their diggbar urls to deceptively push their site to our followers. If I broadcast a link to the New York Times, people expect to see the New York Times when they click that link. They do not expect to land on Digg.