Betaworks, the company that purchased Digg for the paltry sum of $500,000, has released a first preview of the redesigned Digg on its blog Rethink Digg.

Betaworks promises that the revamped Digg will focus on simplicity with a “fast and thin” experience based on sorting stories into the three core categories of top stories, popular, and upcoming.

“The experience must be fast and thin,” Betaworks’ Digg team wrote on their blog.  “Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.”

According to Betaworks, the new Digg score will be aggregated from Diggs, Facebook likes, and Tweets in order to have an accurate barometer of what the Internet is talking about beyond the walls of Digg.com

In order for Digg.com to be sucsessful, the first preview — called V1 by Betaworks — must be able to differentiate Digg sufficently from Reddit. While Betaworks doesn’t have a huge financial incentive to make Digg succeed — as they purchased it for pennies — rebuilding the brand could define Betaworks as a Web player to be reckoned with.