Can I vote my friends up or down?

Business Week got the scoop last night on some new social-networking features that have been added to Digg.com. I haven’t checked them all out, in part because the site was running really slowly for me (which isn’t surprising, since lots of people are no doubt trying to see the new additions) but I think the move makes a lot of sense.

In many ways, Digg has been a social network without a lot of the things that other social networks have. Although you could always see someone’s profile — how many articles they had submitted, how many they had Dugg, and so on — the primary focus of the site was simply voting articles (and, more recently, comments) up or down. The new features add the traditional accoutrements of a social network to the site, including more extensive profile creation, adding of friends, and the ability to talk about links or articles with friends on a message board that Business Week describes as being very similar to Facebook’s wall. With the click of a tab, you can even see the links that two or more of your friends have Dugg.

These enhancements may not exactly be earth-shattering, and there aren’t really any that break much new ground, but I think they are long overdue for Digg. If the site wants to grow and deepen its relationship with its members and users, this is one of the ways to do that, although many of the commenters on a Dugg link to the Business Week article don’t seem all that thrilled by the idea.