Digg.com, the social news site, has sold off it’s brand, technology and website for the bargain price of $500k to Betaworks, who are looking to revive their own news sharing site with Digg’s technology. Previous parts of Digg were also recently sold – The Washington Post bought half of Digg’s staff for $12 million, and LinkedIn bought patents from Digg for a reported $4 million.
All together, that not a bad sum, but back in 2008 Google was rumored to have offered $200 million to buy them out, an offer which they refused.
It’s incredible how fast companies rise and fall in the internet world. AOL was at one point the largest ISP worldwide and now all but disappeared. Netscape was the choice of Internet browsers and webserver software was widely used – now long gone. Yahoo is also possibly on the brink of disappearing, now largely irrelevant as the world around them has changed faster than they’ve been able to keep up with. It’s an interesting and fast changing world out there, and as technology continues to evolve and change, there’s going to be plenty more companies who are are the top right now, slowly disappear over time.