Neothoughts

Netscape has launched a new beta version of its browser, Navigator. If you had not heard about it already, its a browser with features of their social news site built in, such as voting, submitting, tracking your friends etc. It’s a must-have for any hardcore Netscape user.

There’s a rumor going around that Netscape, as we know it in it’s social news form, is to be discontinued by AOL. The rumor stems from AOL having launched a “new” Netscape branded portal, which is basically a re-branding of AOL’s portal.

At this time it is not clear who Michael Arrington’s sources are, however as a Netscape Scout, I can say that I don’t see anyone “freaking out,” and I certainly am not.

It is anyone’s guess as to what could have occurred within AOL to result in launching another Netscape-branded portal. The banner they are running on the front page of Netscape.com suggests that it is in response to user feedback. When Jason Calacanis launched the Netscape social news offering, there was an initial backlash from the old portal users. But that was over a year ago.

Since then the Netscape user base has grown considerably, with 300,000 registered users and over 10 million visitors per month. Their enthusiasm for the site abounds, as evidenced in recent comment threads.

In any case, Tom Drapeau, Director of Netscape, was quick to put this rumor to bed with this comment on TechCrunch:

Umm…. who are all of these sources? I run the Netscape.com social news site now, and I wrote the text that you quoted in your article.

The cobrand launch this week was simply an effort to give a place to go for those who desire a Netscape portal experience instead of a social news experience.

The Netscape.com social news team is alive and well, despite your “rumors”, and have extensive plans for 2007 and 2008 which are already in progress. We may exist in a different AOL division than the AOL.com team, but that doesn’t make this a turf war.

I am speaking to the editorial team right now, and as they knew this portal was launching weeks in advance… they aren’t “completely freaked out”.

Where are you getting these sources/rumors?

If you are curious to know about Netscape.com, e-mail me at tom at newnetscape dot com.

Tom

Marcien Jenckes, SVP AOL Messaging, Community & Voice, quickly followed with his support for Tom and Netscape:

I want to echo Tom’s post. Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do.

Personally, I’m not impressed with the addition of a new Netscape-branded portal. It will do nothing but add to the confusion surrounding the Netscape brand, which has been a constant problem over the years. And speaking of literally damaging a brand: what happened to the Netscape logo to make it all squished, jaggy and blurry on that portal? But I digress.

Clearly there is some fumbling around with the Netscape brand going on at AOL right now, but it is going too far to suggest that AOL is pulling the plug on the Netscape social news site.

UPDATE: James Marcus, Netscape’s Lead Anchor, chimes in with his take on this.

It occurs to me that Google’s new comments-from-relevant-parties feature on Google News is similar to meta-journalism a la Netscape. Here’s an example.

Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis square off with each other on the latest episode of the GigaOM Show. They discuss the wisdom of the crowd vs. editorial oversight (read: Digg vs. Netscape) and their new ventures Mahalo and Pownce. If you listen closely, you can just barely make out the blood-lust beneath their well-mannered banter.

Today is my 366th day as a Netscape Navigator Scout. One year later, they’re still paying people for social bookmarking on the interweb.

When Jason Calacanis put out the call for top social media contributors to come and contribute to Netscape for $1,000/month, many people (including myself) scoffed at the idea. They said he was trying to buy a community for Netscape, anyone who took him up was a sell-out/traitor, etc.

At the time, I was a top contributor on Digg. When I realized it would be pretty cool to get paid for doing something that I would be doing anyway, some of my contacts on Digg were skeptical. They said it would end up feeling like a job, that the capitalism would corrupt my hobby and I would lose interest, that I would quit within 3 months.

Well, perhaps needless to say, none of that happened. My enthusiasm for social news has not waned in the least. It has been an invaluable experience for a number of reasons, perhaps most important of which is it gave me a part-time job that allowed me to quit my day job and focus on my own startup, which recently launched its first product.

The Scout program is still going strong at Netscape. I was one of the first 10 to be hired, back when it was repeatedly said that the program was “experimental” and could be pulled at any moment. Now we’re up to 37 Scouts, including celeb Scout Wil Wheaton. And Scouts are not only submitting stories and commenting now, but also killing spam, closing duplicate stories and redirecting middle-man submissions. Basically, we’re trying to keep the place neat and tidy.

By far, the highlight of working for Netscape has been watching the steady increase in both the usage of and excitement for the site. When I started, we were faced with a community who had had the social news format forced on them and many were disillusioned by it. They wanted their old Netscape portal back. The front page was filled with stories with 10 votes or less. Interestingly, many of those disillusioned users began using the social news format to express their displeasure, getting drawn into it without realizing it.

With 10 million monthly readers including Stephen Colbert, 300,000 registered users, 500,000 stories submitted, 1,000,000 comments made, Netscape has come a long way. It is now common to see multiple stories on the front page with 100+ votes.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

I was perusing the HTML source code of Netscape.com when I noticed that they have the Quantcast script. This means the numbers you see here are about as accurate as you can get without looking at actual server logs.

So what does Quantcast have to say? Apparently the Netscape.com domain received almost 12 million uniques in June. If you remove the sub-domains that don’t make up the social news site (about 9%), you get over 10 million uniques. Note that Quantcast’s numbers are also likely to be low since they rely on the javascript to be enabled on the visitor’s browser.

I’ve been a Netscape Scout for a year now and this even surprised me. I’ve seen some pretty steady growth in the usage of the site. For example, when I started, half the stories on the front page had less than 10 votes. Nowadays it is not uncommon to see the top 5 stories with 100+ votes each. Over 300,000 users have registered. Over 500,000 stories have been submitted. And over 1,100,000 comments have been made. (All of those numbers are available on the Netscape tracker)

That all being said, I think it’s safe to say this amount of traffic is higher than anyone would have expected. So it begs the question: why don’t they tout this? This, combined with their Google PageRank of 9, should make Netscape extremely attractive to content producers.

UPDATE: Krista from Quantcast confirms in the comments that they measure Netscape’s traffic directly.

The top 2 stories at Netscape earlier today complimented each other beautifully (as seen above).

The first story is about the sexuality of bible-belt conservatives. It reveals that Texas is the second most well represented state on the popular sex and swingers site, Adult Friend Finder.

The second story was submitted about 9 hours later. According to that story, Coy Privette, the president of the Christian Action League, is being charged with six counts of aiding and abetting or participating in the world’s oldest profession.

Where do these guys find the time?

Apparently Stephen Colbert is a Netscape reader. He closed last night’s show by commenting on a story he found on Netscape about a Chinese secret society challenging the Illuminati.

Update: Jeff Hoard has more details. Netscape has a discussion about this under way.

If you were watching the Netscape tracker yesterday, you would have noticed a massive spike in new registrations. It coincided with their re-launch of My.Netscape, which uses the same login as their social news site.

The result: over 6,000 new registrations in one day. This helped to push them past a new milestone: 150,000 registered users.

And if you consider the size of that spike, just wait until they release their new browser with social news features integrated.

Today, Netscape re-launched My.Netscape as a customizable Ajax homepage. Netscape Navigator Fedquip produced this handy tutorial for using it to track Netscape tags:

You might also consider combining multiple tags into one content module by using Yahoo! Pipes.