A revamp of the social-news site Digg has unexpectedly backfired on its owners.

When I heard about a year ago that Digg (a link sharing social networking site) was getting a redesign, I was fairly optimistic. Afterall, sites have to constantly update as technology and users advance.

I even got to get an early look at the "new" Digg - after successfully applying to use the beta version.

The redesign of Digg - which happened a few days ago - has turned into a disaster. By all accounts, the new features are not widely liked, and many popular features have gone.

Every social network suffers a backlash when it makes changes. Most regular users of Digg for example are used to how it used to work. Major changes disrupt people's habits and create resentment.

Facebook found this out in its early stages - every time it changed its home page, group after group was created calling on the changes to be reversed. Eventually, Facebook started to make small changes incrementally, rather than large overhauls. Google has made the same mistake with overhauling its (once) excellent Google News service.

Digg's problem is that it didn't phase in its changes, to allow its regular users to grow comfortable with the changes. Instead, there is a form of system shock.

I am an infrequent user of Digg - and I much preferred the old version. In particular, I liked the fact that Digg had sections for different kinds of news - political, opinion, environment, design - that I could browse. I enjoyed finding different kinds of news that I didn't get from the normal news websites I visit.

The new Digg focuses on pushing links that have been "dugg" (shared) by your friends and other accounts you've chosen to follow. As a result, it creates a homogenous list of links for you. The appeal of Digg - to me - was finding new links that I wouldn't have otherwise found.

There are a lot of other issues I have with the New Digg - and there are some improvements.

However, if Digg survives the "flight" of users, it should implement any future changes more incrementally.