• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 4, 2009

Taking a page from Twitter, social news site Digg is testing a new feature highlighting trending stories that have not yet hit the home page. Under the initiative -- called Digg Trends -- hot stories will be posted at the top of the home page for 10 minutes at a time, allowing users to vote them up or down.

If the story gets enough Diggs within that time frame, it will remain on the home page. Otherwise, a message will appear showing the trend failed, and the story will get buried. Trending stories are selected based on a high volume of Diggs, comments, favorites, shares and other activities on the site.

"The goal of Digg Trends is to put high-activity stories in front of the community quickly and to present a fun new way for people to express whether they like the story or not," wrote software engineer Kurt Wilms on the Digg company blog. "We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible."

The idea is similar to Twitter's popular trending topics, which offer a window onto what subjects are cresting in the Twitterverse at any given minute. As such, it has become an instant gauge of social buzz more broadly. Underscoring the connection, Digg has even set up a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the home page.

But given that Digg is already promoting and ranking stories by popularity, its own twist on the trending concept seems somewhat redundant. It's not likely to have the same impact as Twitter's trending topics because users already have a sense of what stories are percolating up through the system just by looking at the front page.

It also begs the question of why Digg doesn't just post a separate list of trending stories on the main page, based on the broader site activity criteria. It would make the feature less of a game for users but something more like a breaking news service akin to Twitter's trending topics.