Digg is known for harnessing the power of social media to create cool toys based on real-time activity of its users. So far, they’ve had Digg Spy, Digg Stack, Digg Swarm and Digg BigSpy, and now they’ve released a new visualization tool - Digg Arc.

These tools fall either under the “somewhat useful” or “whoa, cool colors” category, and sadly, Digg Arc seems to be of the second variety. It organizes stories and categories into a series of concentrated circles, while connections between stories are being shown with colorful arcs. Unfortunately, after some tinkering with it, I fail to find how I could use this new service to get more out of Digg. Unlike Digg spy, which is very useful for catching what’s hot on Digg in real time, Arc is hard to follow and doesn’t have an option to see only upcoming stories, which is disappointing. Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that Digg is constantly bringing something new to the table (leaving competition far behind in the dust), but I’d rather prefer a less visually stunning tool which I can use on a daily basis.

On the good side, Arc looks really nice in full screen mode, which you can enable by right clicking anywhere on the screen. It’s also available in a standalone desktop version.