Inside Digg’s Race to Build the New Google Reader ⇥ wired.com

Mat Honan, Wired:

“I would love to be able to configure the Digg button to just do what I want,” McLaughlin says. “We’ve got to rejuvenate that whole infrastructure. Digg buttons have remained remarkably resilient around the Internet. But to rejuvenate that we have to make the verb meaningful again.”

McLaughlin is talking about the future of Digg Reader, the project he and his small team of fifteen have been working on for the past month. Right now it’s just a mess of code, Keynote sides, and shit on a whiteboard. They need to turn it into a real product, one to take the place of Google Reader, which shuts down on July 1. They have less than 60 days.

The way Honan puts together the entirety of this fascinating story makes the bigger Betaworks picture more complete. It all starting to make sense.