The book is still out on widgets, but I’m cautiously optimistic on their performance.

1. First-off, I’ve now received 3 “latest fan” alerts. I didn’t opt in to receive these notes from Digg and even though you can control how you get them, I think it’s bad business for Digg to turn them on automatically, especially considering reason #2…
2. Every “latest fan” alert I have received has been completely bogus. The latest, from the Digg user “texasholdemcom”. I’ve never met Mr. Texasholdemcom, but I noticed every post he makes goes to a site with his name. I only see this getting worse.
3. Oops, it already has. Nothing in my email preferences refers to “fans.” How the hell do I stop hearing when I have fans? I shut off all available email alerts, hopefully that works.
4. Perhaps I have so many fans because all of the information on my profile is viewable by anyone by default. Not sure if this was the case before the “enhancements”, but again, this seem like a bad idea.
5. If the Internet has taught us anything, never assume the sex of a person you interact with online regardless of what they tell you. Digg, in a failed attempt at “humor”, further complicates this issue by adding “damsel”, “Dude”, “Grrrl” and others to the gender drop down list.
6. Shouts can definitely become annoying especially if you befriended lots of people to see what they dugg prior to the social networking tools. At least this feature didn’t default to “anyone” when they launched the new tools.
7. Once again, default settings concern me. While only friends can “shout” at me, anyone can read them. Hopefully my friends don’t post anything offensive or personally damaging before I shut that feature off.

Advice to Kevin Rose: you’re barking up the wrong tree. While I haven’t figured out how my companies will work with Facebook, I know I won’t try to go heads up with them. Rather than adding Facebook tools to Digg, you should have added Digg tools to Facebook.