In a video released on Friday the 28th, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced details for the social news site's upcoming launch of version 4, due "very soon". The details that have been released so far indicate a major shift in functionality and integration/competition with social networking services.
Gigaom reports on the new Digg, the result of over one-year of programming:

[It will] extend the site's current social features (which are pretty minimal) to allow for both friending and following other users and publishers. So if you friend a user, you see what they Digg and comment on; if you follow a publisher, you see everything they publish. The result is a personalized news page that seems like a combination of Google Reader, the Facebook news feed and Twitter.

Kevin Rose highlights what he sees as the advantages of a socially-aggregated news feed that lacks the miscellaneous status updates ("am walking down street", "am buying soda" etc) of Facebook and Twitter.

Condé Nast Digital's Reddit, another social news website and Digg's closest competitor, has not indicated any desire to emulate this level of social-networking integration in their platform. Instead, Reddit's growth has been largely centered around the growth of 'subreddits'. These theme-specific micro-sites allow users to group socially-aggregated stories together in unique customized formats.

Digg's announcement reflects a growing trend towards the blurring of the lines between social-networking and news publishing online. As reported in May, Nieman Journalism Lab covered a recently published academic paper entitled "What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media," which examined what characterizes Twitter as a hybrid social networking and news media site. There is also recent data that indicated for the first time that Facebook was referring more traffic to news stories that Google News.

Digg's new direction also speaks to a growing appreciation for the personalization and interest-level offered by socially-aggregated news stories, particularly when those stories are recommended by friends similar taste or preferences. It is still too early to say whether this latest move by Digg may still be too little, too late, given the massive user-base of Facebook and Twitter.