At this point most web designers & developers ingrained in the field know about DesignFloat. It’s a very popular social news submission service where blog authors or content readers can submit their favorite or most interesting news articles, and the published stories with the most votes hit the front page. It has spurred many similar sites, but DesignFloat has always reigned king.

I recently had a fantastic interview with the site’s Relations Manager Mortimer. He revealed some interesting tidbits about DesignFloat, along with their future plans for market competition and how to innovate the social network.

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Since the major success of Dribbble designers and developers have been looking for such amazing communities to share resources. Because of this, Forrst.com isn’t really a totally new idea in and of itself. However the implementation and UI features are so unique, the community has exploded over the past few months since launch.

Forrst allows you to register an account and run your own profile, similar to a Twitter or Foursquare profile. You can follow other designers/developers in the community to receive their updates on your homepage dashboard.. also in real-time! You can choose to share graphics or mockup designs, called “snaps”, with all of your followers in the community. You can also share snippits of code and even as questions directly to the Forrst community!

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As we all know, Kevin Rose is the brilliant face behind the wildly popular social news site Digg.com. This past Sunday via this tweet Rose leaked a photo which shows a preview of what the new Digg may look like.

There’s actually some in-depth analysis and discussions over at TechCrunch’s post as well. It appears as though the entire home screen has gotten a re-make, showcasing more of a personal list of stories instead of the most popular for the day.

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Google has made some major design changes over the past 10 or 20 years. Although their overall vision hasn’t changed much, they’ve added new features and design ideas to the site. Just recently they’ve launched their newest addition to Google with their new search listings design.

You can tell just from Google’s homepage that something’s different. The buttons and search bar look completely new and improved, along with some updates to their logo with added glossy and “web 2.0″ effects. Although not a new feature, Google has kept with the Ajax loading of header and footer links on the page for faster load times.

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Popular social news site Mixx has launched a new YourMixx homepage. The YourMixx section is a customized portion of your homepage which is displayed as soon as you log into the site. It’s different from the front page of other sites such as Digg, as it is customized for each users preferences.

The Mixx Staff has released a new blog post mentioning some of the new updates. To me it sounds very exciting, the staff at Mixx are really trying to listen to what the users have to say, and are working from that angle to fix any issues wrong with the YourMixx homepage.

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Template Monster has really made a name for itself over the past couple of years. Growing into the leading provide for website templates, clearly the company’s CEO David Braun is doing something right. I’ve been a huge fan of Template Monster for years now and have written about their blog earlier this year.

However with 2010 kicking around, I was intrigued to hear about how Template Monster is doing and where they may be heading. I’ve got a great interview with David below, discussing future plans for TM and where the company will be growing into.

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There are plenty of social news and media outlets today used for sharing and promoting articles. Especially once we break down website’s into niches and focus on the web design and graphics tutorials portion, we’ve got plenty of sites. However there appears to be a new launch for a Drigg-powered social news site, WebDev5.

The site’s design is sturdy and everything runs very smooth on the site. Just by checking out how the XHTML/CSS and JavaScript work together you can tell it’s not based on the popular Pligg CMS, but of course Drigg is an alternative which runs very nicely for a Digg-clone site.

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