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.
“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.
(Update: A WaPo spokesperson says that SocialCode engineers will only be working on SocialCode itself — it’s a social advertising agency that works across social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, not the Washington Post itself. Trove, Social Reader and Personal Post are products of WaPo Labs, another subsidiary of the Washington Post Company.)
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.
