News.me ditched to focus on Digg

Online media firm Betaworks said in a blog post that it pulled News.me applications for iPhones and iPads from Apple's online App Store because Twitter launched competing products and tightened rules for outside software makers.

"Here's what it comes down to: we don't want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies," Betaworks said in a message at the News.me website.

The company planned to put its energy into Digg, which it said has been visited by more than four million people since it was relaunched about three months ago.

Digg, the once high-flying social news site, relaunched in August under new ownership after a six-week rebuilding.

Digg, created in 2004, became a global sensation as an online venue for submitting news stories that climbed or sank in rankings based on votes, referred to at the website as "diggs."

The new Digg requires users to login with Facebook as "a short-term solution that will seriously cut down on spam, while we take our time to develop more robust spam-filter technology."

It uses Facebook shares, tweets, and other data to determine where a story should sit on the home page "but we care first and foremost about what Digg users have to say measured, as always, in diggs."

More than 28 million stories were submitted to Digg since it launched. But it fell out of favor as people shifted to rival services and social networks Facebook and Twitter to share news with friends.

Industry figures indicate about seven million people visited Digg each month before it was sold.

News.me was launched early last year as a way for people to easily share when friends at Twitter or Facebook are reading.