Digg launched their new Digg toolbar, the DiggBar today. If you want to try it out, simply add http://digg.com/ at the very beginning of the address of any website in your browser's address bar (before the http://). Doing so will convert the entire URL into a shortened Digg URL string.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the DiggBar misidentified the homepage of Obsessable as one of our comparators: "Top portable media players under $150." This is the way the homepage itself appears on Digg.com, and yet, I remember our homepage being Dugg back when we first launched, so it's unclear if this is some error specific to our site or if the DiggBar displays the latest version of a story with the same URL.

This little oddity aside, as you can also see, the DiggBar adds some cool functionality, including the ability to Digg the story, the ability to click on the title of the story to jump to its page on Digg, an option to Bury the story, an option to see related stories, a nice big Random button that will take you randomly through other stories that have been submitted to Digg (much like the Stumble function of the StumbleUpon toolbar), and ways to share the Digg story via Facebook, Twitter, email, or via Digg's Shout feature. If you use the Random feature, you will from time to time be presented with a promotional link that is clearly labelled as such (unlike StumbleUpon's practice of working purchased links into normal stumbling), but it's unclear how the Digg user base will respond to this bit of advertisement. All in all, the new functionality appears to be a very direct shot across the bow of StumbleUpon. Social network wars anyone?

See the video embedded below for a tour of the DiggBar's functionality from Kevin Rose.  

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

This story around the web: