Last week I sat down with Digg founder Kevin Rose to get the Digg “State of the Union.” The company, now more than four years old, has continued to grow incredibly since launching in late 2004 and regularly innovates with new products. They are rumored to be approaching profitability after making headcount cuts earlier this year. But much of the hype around Digg is now in the past. From 2006 onwards there were regular rumors of Digg being acquired. So many, in fact, that we called on CEO Jay Adelson to “Just sell Digg already” in late 2007. And Jay certainly tried to. They were very (so very) close to closing a deal with Google in mid 2008, but the deal fell apart at the 11th hour. Digg was quite literally left standing at the altar. And we believe that the company made the decision at that point to stop looking for buyers and to focus quietly on the core business for a long while. They raised more money late last year.I talk to Kevin about the history of Digg for about half of the 30 minute interview. There’s a lot of good content about the early attempts to buy Digg, since it’s far enough in the past that he feels comfortable talking about it. But the forward looking stuff is easily the most interesting. I asked Kevin if he felt that any of the numerous competitors (AOL Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, Mixx, Reddit, Hacker News) were a true threat to Digg. He shook his head no before I even finished the question (skip to the 29 minute mark), and said something surprising: “I just feel that we’re heading in a different direction than them.” When pressed for more details, he says that they’re launching a product to address the real-time threat that Twitter, Facebook and others are focused on, and that the new Digg search was the first hint of what they’re thinking of. More details soon, I’m sure.The full transcript is below:Michael Arrington: I’m here with Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose.Kevin Rose: Hey.Arrington: Thanks for inviting me to your office.Rose: Yeah, thanks for co