It’s Official: 15 Digg Engineers Are Joining Washington Post’s SocialCode

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More

Another bit of closure for Digg as the company continues to look for a buyer of its technology and its site: its engineering team is joining SocialCode, the social media advertising and analytics subsidiary of the Washington Post Company.

We first wrote about the engineers getting hired by WaPo on Monday, when rumors began to swirl that the newspaper group had bought Digg. Now the news has been made official with a post on Digg’s blog by CEO Matt Williams.

The Washington Post notes that in all, 15 engineers are joining the team. Among them, Alan Lippman, Digg’s VP of advertising products, becomes the chief scientist at SocialCode. Software developer Will Larson will become director of engineering.

SocialCode, which launched in January 2011, has offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC, and Digg’s engineers will “augment” that team, which Williams says “shares our same values & culture.”

“At Digg, we have been studying social media since its inception. From Digg Social Reader to Digg Ads, we established a new paradigm for content and advertising on the web. Joining SocialCode felt like a natural next step,” Williams writes.

Products that the new team will likely work on include Trove, SocialCode’s social news platform, which powers Washington Post’s own Social Reader and Personal Post.

The addition of new talent may also see SocialCode extending its reach in developing products for third parties beyond the Washington Post’s walls, although this isn’t made clear in the blog post.

The Digg technical staff will be integrated with and augment SocialCode’s existing engineering team with development offices in San Francisco, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Digg is a user driven social content website split up into two sections – “Popular” stories and “Upcoming” stories. After you submit content it goes into the “Upcoming” stories section. This is where other people read your submission and “Digg” what they like best. If your story receives enough Diggs, it’s promoted to the “Popular” section and listed on the front page for other visitors to see. This effectively allows the Digg community to choose which...

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The Washington Post Company (NYSE:WPO) is an American education and media company, best known for owning the newspaper it is named after, The Washington Post.

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Posted in: Engineers,Joining,Official,Posts,SocialCode,Washington