What makes Digg work (good or bad, that’s not the point) is the community built around it. Give them a different service that might “solve” some of Digg’s problems, and they won’t switch. A few might, but it wouldn’t be noticeable.

If you like to go to a bar, where all your friends go too, where the beer may not be the best, but you’re used to it, where the bartender can call you SOB and you don’t get offended – would you go to that other new bar simply because the beer is a bit better?

I don’t know if Kevin Rose will be watching Thoof closely, he might, but I don’t think he has much to worry about.

Out of all these supposedly “Digg killers” that have been announced lately, there’s only one in this space I see doing interesting stuff, and that’s probably because unlike the others, I don’t see it competing against Digg at all (that’s corank.com btw). I mean, the song’s always the same “this is like Flickr but…”, “this is like MySpace but…”, “This is like Digg but…”. Digg has problems, it isn’t perfect, but launching a site that supposedly fixes some of them doesn’t automatically tansform it into a threat.

The site is actually down right now though. I look forward to checking it out.