Owen Byrne

Cofounder of Digg

• Born: 1965
• Birthplace: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

Primary Company/Organization: Digg

Introduction

A cofounder of Digg, Owen Byrne was an experienced software engineer who prepared the PHP code for the social news site while assisting Kevin Rose and other partners in organizing the business. He was also a web engineer for GazeHawk, a company that develops eye-tracking services using webcams rather than specialized peripherals, which was purchased by Facebook in March 2012. Byrne went on to develop software for a number of well-known travel-related web companies, including Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar.

Early Life

Owen Byrne was born in 1965 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Byrne graduated from Saint Mary's in 1986 with a bachelor's degree in computer science, and after working for ASL Environmental Science as a systems programmer for four years, he returned to school to earn his master's in business administration from Dalhousie University in 1994. He worked in tech support for Dalhousie's Faculty of Medicine from 1990 to 1992.

After school, Byrne worked as an adviser for Enercon Engineering and Consulting (1994–95) before taking a position as a software developer for the Halifax Chronicle-Herald in 1994, a position he held for six years, working concurrently the first two years as a test preparation instructor for Kaplan Test Prep. He attended graduate school at the University of Manitoba while working for the Chronicle-Herald, completing all the requirements for a Ph.D. in management and operations research except the dissertation. From 2001 to 2004, he was a self-employed web developer; he was hired by TechTV's Kevin Rose to develop the code for a new site called Digg (the domain name dig.com was taken by Disney), which would be a news site with a social networking element.

Life's Work

Although urban legend has it that Digg founder Rose hired Byrne via the freelance project listings site Elance for $200, Byrne was actually an equity contributor to the site, which was constructed in 2004 before the company organized in February 2005 and became a full-time job a few months later, when Rose left his TechTV hosting job.

Byrne was instrumental in getting the site off the ground, and Digg grew quickly in popularity, but when Jay Adelson came on board as chief executive officer (CEO) and the staff expanded, the site was redesigned from the ground up by Tim Ellis, Steve Williams, and Eli White, while Ron Gorodetzky developed a search engine and the HTTP architecture. Until 2005, Byrne remained the primary technical decision maker and had input into strategy, operations, and customer support.

Digg prospered quickly. Even before Byrne, as senior software engineer, handed over the reins of the site design to the new staff, it was one of the top 500 sites in the world and ranked as high as fifty-fifth in world traffic. It filled a niche similar to that filled by Slashdot (already a dinosaur, having been founded in 1997) and Reddit (established the same year as Digg): It was a social news site that, whether by design or in response to the demographics of heavy Internet users, appealed largely to “geeks” (albeit not necessarily the Star Trek–quoting science-fiction fans portrayed in popular culture): detail-oriented, cerebral, pragmatic, and well-read engineers, linguists, and scientists. Any registered user could submit any link (typically to a news story, although not necessarily to a professional news source). Other users voted on links, with votes in favor counted as “diggs” (as in “I dig your link, it's really cool”) and votes against counted as “buries.” The result—the key to Digg in a nutshell—was a constantly shifting series of lists of ranked stories. The more people used Digg, the more robust the system of voting would be. (By extension, a story's popularity on Digg could lead to its server being overwhelmed by the traffic, as had been the case with “slashdotted” sites for years.)

Digg's success happened, in Ernest Hemingway's words, “gradually, then suddenly.” The site was almost constantly tweaked in its first year, as Rose and others transitioned from other jobs to working on Digg nearly full time. (Rose, Adelson, and some of the other Digg staff were also involved with the web TV start-up Revision3, begun at the same time and occupying some of their attention.) Adelson raised considerable venture capital. Like Twitter later, the site became a recognizable brand name even while it was still occupied with defining that brand. As with many Internet start-ups, even after the dot-com bubble had burst, established companies—including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!—began to make offers to buy Digg. No agreement was reached, however, and the allure of the brand faded. Interestingly, one of the factors affecting the perception that Digg's popularity was going to fade was the introduction of Yahoo! Buzz, a social news site that Yahoo! rolled out when it was unable to acquire Digg; as it turned out, Buzz remained such a nonentity in social media that Google had no qualms naming its social-networking tool Google Buzz two years later, before Yahoo! Buzz was even formally discontinued.

Byrne left Digg in October 2007, three years after he had come on board, right around the height of its fame. He then worked for the online travel agency Expedia (July 2008–May 2010), as senior manager of Travelpod Labs and Astrum Solar (2010), as director of information technology. He served as director of engineering for GazeHawk (April 2011–April 2012), a company that offered eye-tracking services using webcams and paid volunteers to track the areas of a web page to which the viewer's attention was drawn. GazeHawk was bought out by Facebook. From 2012 to 2013, Byrne worked for Reputation.com as lead engineer. He moved on to a technical manager and principal engineer position with the rival travel site TripAdvisor, remaining there from May 2013 to October 2016. Byrne spent a year and a half as a software engineer for Zipcar, a car-sharing company, before joining the business-oriented social network LinkedIn as senior site reliability engineer in May 2018.

Personal Life

Byrne lives in Northern California. He occasionally blogs about his experiences at Digg, including a disclaimer for legal safety, but he has been clear that the possibility of legal reprisals prevents him from being too open and specific. He is an avid photographer (with photos featured in several magazines) and marathon runner, and he is a member of the public-speaking group Toastmasters International.

Bibliography

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print. Examines social media, new forms of creative expression, and their impact on media studies.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print. Examines the impact of social media on the business world.

Sarno, David. “Digg Gets $28.7M Boost, Plans to Double Size, Go Global.” Los Angeles Times 23 Sept. 2008: n. pag. Print. Coverage of Digg's rise from the company's peak period.