For those following along at home, in July I wrote about the possibility of digg emulating features of Facebook ("diggbook", if you will). It looks like I was pretty close.
Kevin just announced that they'll be adding a more social-centric feel to digg. A short video of some of the features is now available. What these new features do is make the concept of friending people via digg much more appealing. You can point out particular stories to your friends with a quick message (which is great, since I usually tend to do that over IM or email), and what's most important is revamping the user profile page to add profile pictures, display user information, show your recent activity (including comments, diggs, and profile updates), and so on. As I speculated earlier, it's a lot like the concept of Facebook's mini feed.
What's missing right now is a social recommendation aspect. It looks like they're going to be adding some additional filters for you so you can more easily see comments, diggs, and other additions by your friends, but they still need a way to either analyze previous diggs and show stories you might be interested in, or a way to analyze your friends' diggs and make recommendations based on that. The former looks to be a goal they have in mind for the future ("Story Suggest"), but it seems like that might be months away from being released.
The thing with digg is that they love commenting on upcoming releases, although they tend to do that way too early. They spill the beans ahead of time too much, which, in my opinion, lessens the impact of any changes and updates they make. It's fun to mention that there will be a vague update down the line, but there's a point where you want to withhold information to either make a bigger impact, keep competitors in the dark, and so on. It also reduces irritation for your userbase. They've been hammering away the "digg images is coming soon!" line for months now. They've been saying comment changes are coming soon. But those types of announcements seem to be a tad bit on the early side.
Oh, I'd say there are times when it's beneficial. For one, you can get people talking about it. If you're a big enough company, that could mean blog mentions and an overall bigger buzz when you do launch. But if you're going to be doing something like this, you'd best have concrete dates in mind in terms of launching and you better not miss them. Keep things vague, keep things interesting, and don't stretch it out unnecessarily, and you can make a pretty good splash. Or you could go the Apple route and not mention a thing leading up to a new product release.
I definitely agree. I don't think promoting an upcoming release is necessary, or even remotely beneficial.