September 13, 2007

AOL Moves Social News from Netscape.com to Propeller.com

In an anticipated move, AOL has announced that it will move the social news site provided at Netscape.com (a Digg type site) to Propeller.com. The new site is not live yet. Users going to Netscape.com will currently still find the social news site; however, they will soon be redirected to the new Netscape portal that is already available. The Netscape portal offers a traditional look, some news blended with other features including the opportunity to engage with the news through the social news site.

According to Netscape, this move is to empower users to choose how they want to consume the news and participate in the community. In short, although the social news site had a active group of supporters, this just simply did not meet the needs of AOL's broader audience. Will this move propel AOL's social news experiment into oblivion or spur new growth and innovation? This remains to be seen.

The social news site was launched with Jason Calcanis on board to thump the drum and encourage staying the course. It was originally thought that this site might challenge Digg for supremacy in the social news space. However, with the departure of Calcanis to his new venture Mahalo, the site lost an influential internal social networking supporter, and traditionalists, wanting to bring back features that users missed, held the day.

A look at the new portal site suggests that the new blend may have a lot to offer – a news portal at Netscape.com that provides users a with a traditional look and feel but includes the opportunity for users to participate in the process through Propeller. To make this work there are challenges that Propeller.com will have to overcome. First, if it is to survive, the site will need to encourage current users to continue using the social news features available at the new domain. The more daunting task will be encouraging new users to join the community. Users and their dedication to the process is the lifeblood of any community. Will the community stay intact? Will it garner new users from those using the more traditional portal site? This will depend on how AOL communicates the change to its multiple audiences and user enthusiasm.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 12:05 PM | Permalink

September 7, 2007

AOL announces changes to Netscape

The Netscape blog announced yesterday some upcoming changes to their service. Basically, they announced that they are going back to offering a more traditional news experience, much like the one that the Netscape site used to offer.

The post states that this is in response to user input which told them that people did want a social news experience, but that they did not expect to find it at Netscape.com. The announcement did say that they plan to move the social news site to a new URL, and that they would make an annoucement once the switchover was made. Based on this, the social news service does sound like something they will continue to operate.

Over at TechCrunch, Duncan Riley wrote that the Netscape Digg Clone is Kaput. It's hard to disagree, as this move by Netscape is clearly not a sign of a runaway success story. This potential has been visible for a while.

The traffic and voting volume on Netscape is quite a bit lower than that on Digg. For example, there is a story on Netscape's home page as I write this that has only 8 votes. You are not making the Digg home page with 8 votes. Also, the site is just too similar in structure. People are naturally going to focus their efforts on the bigger fish, which is Digg.

The first thing it will be interesting to see is how the transtion is managed. Will they move the social news site over, or will they simply discontinue it? AOL would not be making this move if they thought that there was a potential for a large return on the property. And, if that's the case, why continue it all?

Posted by at 2:31 PM | Permalink

September 5, 2006

Netscape Search Inserts Netscape News Above Web Results

What's this? Netscape Search has changed? So says Netscape's Jason Calacanis. What's new? From what Jason says and I can see, the big difference is that there's a new "Netscape.com results" section at the top of the page that shows you top voted stories from the Netscape community news service.

More on that service is cover in my Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Mode post. After the Netscape.com results, you'll get Google-powered results from across the web.

To be clear, this isn't a case of users voting particular stories to the top of search results, say on a query-by-query basis. Rather, from what I can tell, stories get popular over at Netscape.com itself. Then the top stories over there might show up in response to searches at Netscape Search, if they are a good keyword match. In other words, think of it as NetscapeRank. If a story has good NetscapeRank, that might help it rank well in keyword search results.

FYI marketers, it might not take much to pick up that rank. A query on cars gives me three results that have only one or two votes each. More than votes might be involved, of course -- and I haven't seriously poked at this in any details. But there may be opportunities, though the Netscape traffic is far, far less than at the major search engines.

From a searcher perspective, I guess it's mainly useful if you want to be alerted to news results in the course of your regular web searching. Places like Google and Yahoo have long done this already. The difference with Netscape is that you can get your news sourced from a community, rather than an algorithmic search engine.

Then again, use the Google Co-op link for Digg you'll find here, and then you'll sort of get what Netscape is doing, just with Digg as your news source showing up at the top of Google searches.

Perhaps down the line, we'll see Digg follow Netscape's lead and make it possible to search Digg and the web at the same time, something that doesn't seem possible right now at the Digg site.

Finally, search.netscape.com is a long-standing address for Netscape Search. That's still active and redirecting here, where the "old" Netscape search remains active.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:18 AM | Permalink

June 15, 2006

Netscape Aims To Be Digg 2.0, Slashdot 3.0 With Community News Model

I was never a big Slashdot fan, given that I found the conversations about search often had comments from people who didn't know what they were talking about. Digg came along and hardly won me over. Having one of my stories Dugg over there reinforced the idea that Digg was Slashdot 2.0 in all the wrong ways. Now AOL is trying to revive its flagging Netscape brand by turning it into a Digg-clone or Slashdot 3.0, if you will. You'll find the new version here.

Good luck. Seriously, I know Slashdot/Diggish sites are obviously popular with plenty of people who are not like me, and I fully recognize they serve their own communities. I've even pondered doing our own search version for Search Engine Watch, just as John Battelle has been thinking about this week. But if so, I'd never give up the editorial model that I'm used to. Call me old fashioned -- heck, I still like reading print newspapers -- but I still think there's a place for someone you trust to help filter out what they think is important.

Of course, any individual or small group might not have the "wisdom of the crowd" and miss a big event. So things like Digg definitely have a role. They also have their imperfections, too -- the crowd can be full of idiots or manipulated behind the scenes by only a few, as Digg's been accused of.

Anyway, perhaps Netscape will turn out to be a new super-site for the community news crowd. We'll see. As for the site itself, I took a fly though to see what's up.

The home page has a Netscape Anchors area at the top, where Netscape's paid editorial staff is picking out stuff to feature. That's nice. I like the idea that key things might get play this way.

Off to the right-hand side, you've got Channels, topics of various types. Want to see what's Dugg (Nugg?) for video games? Head to the video games category (conveniently its own subdomain, making it nice crawler-fodder for the search engines).

Each category has its own featured stories. Below that, you'll find the RSS feed for the page, allowing you to subscribe and get just the latest posts for that area. Nice.

Of course, one of Netscape's big selling features is the idea that it is both broader -- covering more than technology that Digg handles -- plus granular. You can get stuff just about movies or just about politics, if you want it. (FYI, Digg plans its own expansion next week).

What Netscape is doing sounds great, until you look at something like Topix. That's not a community generated news site. Instead, stories at Topix are automatically routed into particular categories. And those categories leave Netscape in the dust.

Video games? I don't want Playstation 2 stuff mixed in with Nintendo Wii items. At Netscape, that's going to happen. At Topix, Nintendo Wii is its own category -- with its own RSS feed, by the way.

How about contributing? You need to be a member. Sign-in here, sign-up here or recover your password here. I tried recovering my password, figuring I must be a member of Netscape somehow, someway. I still have my old, old, old AOL name floating about, plus I signed up for the Netscape portal ages ago, when it opened. But the recover feature just sat there grinding away until finally telling me to "Please try back soon!"

Fine. I'll sign-up. I'm not much into avatars, but offering five lame ones is, well, lame. Sure, you can upload your own. I'll get right on that!

What's the minimum information you can get away with to register? Name and email won't cut it. You've got to give up a birth date, as well. A ZIP code or post code doesn't seem required, but Netscape fails to tell you that on the reg form.

Then again, maybe it is required. I could never get my registration to process correctly. No doubt the new site is under a big load. No doubt they knew it would be, so the failure to keep up is either (A) lame or (B) calculated so they can say, "we're so popular that all the demand crashed us. Either way, it's not pleasing.

For any story, you can click to see what others are saying about it. You then have an option to say if the story is good, bad or block seeing comments from a particular person in the future. None of this can be done if you aren't signed in, however. I haven't explored this more, but all the voting probably helps stories rise or fall in Netscape plus allows individuals to gain more attention in the system

There are "Top Netscape Contributors," listed on the right-hand side of the home page. Want a list of them? There's no dedicated page that I can see. Similarly, while there are "Netscape Anchors" also listed, you can't find a page dedicated to all of them. More lameness.

I wanted to play with submission, but as I explained, the system's either not letting me register or I'm registered but it's not letting me sign-in. I can see that stories can be assigned tags in addition to being placed within channels. Ugh. It feels like Netscape is trying to straddle both the Web 1.0 and 2.0 worlds. As a result, you can see all stories tagged family or you can see all stories in the completely different family category. Nothing confusing about that.

Enough of my poking. How about what others are saying?

First of all, what they aren't saying is any help information on the site that I can see. Want to know more about how the new Netscape works, from Netscape itself? There's no info offered. Well heck, the privacy policy and the terms both gave me 500 internal server errors, because I tried to reach them from the family area, and the links (like this one) weren't pointing in the right places. I'm sure help will come, just as those bad links will get fixed, but it would kind of nice to have had it at the start.

Netscape from Jason Calacanis, who is running Netscape now, says pretty much zilch and just points at coverage elsewhere.

Digg this: Calacanis relaunches iconic Netscape.com as a "social news" site at SiliconBeat says the official launch is for July 1 and quotes Calacanis promising "open source journalism" and covers how other names for the site rather than using the beat-up (to me) Netscape brand were considered. But Netscape won out as being tied to the internet and discovering new content. Tied to the internet? Sure. Discovering new content? Yeah, right.

AOL's said to be bold and ambitious by turning a major portal into sending traffic to smaller sites. Um, that's called Google and Yahoo and any search portal you care to name.

The story covers that clickthrough rate is part of the ranking algorithm, so nice to know that will never get abused :)

The Los Angeles Times in Web Users to Make News on Netscape Relaunch talks about the gamble that AOL is making in possibly losing the 11.2 million people who visit the site each month, if they can no longer have the portal features they want. It also covers how the anchors will be sent out to do coverage in areas they watch over. It also talks about Calacanis as self-proclaimed renegade AOL employee who got much of the Netscape work done in a weeklong code jam. Perhaps that's part of the registration jam I'm dealing with now.

Netscape.com Relaunched As a User-Driven News Aggregation Site; Calacanis is GM, Netscape over at PaidContent.org talks about the site having eight anchors/journalists watching over the content and how current Netscape portal features like mail will move to AOL.

AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts from the New York Times talks about the drop in visitors to Netscape (so why not throw the dice?).

New Netscape.com focuses on news from News.com covers more on how the anchors are following up on stories, plus how in addition to the eight anchors, there are 15 part-time specialists. It concludes with Calacanis not sure if it will be a hit.

Certainly, it's a brave attempt. I like the idea of trying to overtly mix in the editors along with the community participation. Whether those editors will get in the way of the community wave that's pushed along the popularity of Digg remains to be seen.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:52 AM | Permalink

September 23, 2004

Search History: Excite & Bluffing For Netscape Net Search

There was a time when I used to track who had what position on the Netscape Net Search page. If a service was there, it was a sure sign that you wanted to be listed with it. That's because so many people used Netscape that its Net Search page -- and the search engines listed on it -- got a ton of traffic. To quote from one of my charts back in 1996:

The Netscape Factor: Netscape Navigator is the most popular browser software on the market. An estimated 75% to 85% of net surfers use it. Netscape has two "buttons" that users can push to search for web sites, a "Net Search" and a "Net Directory" button. Each button makes a page within the Netscape web site appear. On the page, users can directly enter a query to a select group of search engines or directories. Thousands of people push these buttons daily, making the search engines and directories on the related pages extremely important.

Joe Kraus, one of the founders of Excite and Netscape Net Search alumnus, has a great post on how Excite bluffed its way onto that page: Persistence Pays, Part 2. With less than $1 million in the bank, Excite bid $3 million for entry and won -- but only after a stumble. Great reading.

If you want to track who was on that page over the years when it was important, it's all archived for our Search Engine Watch members here: Past Search Providers & Search Results Charts. As for who is important now, I rely more on looking at traffic figures from various rating services. You'll find stats on that over in our Ratings, Reviews & Tests section. As for the page itself, the positioning of multiple search engines died in 1999, when Netscape shifted over to using Google results: Netscape Search Gets Rebuilt.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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