Nov

5

Netscape Getting an Earful From Its Readers

November 5, 2006 |

The Netscape blog asked for some feedback on some changes to the site. You just have to check out the comments on that blog post to see how the netscape users feel.

It’s interesting that a lot of these users say they use netscape for their email - so they are bound to go to the site, but feel no pleasure in doing so. The general tenor though simply is: I hate the new Netscape. Bring back the old site. What do I care about other people’s comments on the news.
Here is typical comment:

suzanne

I hate the new Netscape! If it wasn’t tied to my email account, I would never use it. I go to CNN.com if I want to see the latest news. I don’t like seeing news as it is posted and reviewed by people that I neither know, care to know, and who don’t appear to have any relevant knowledge or experience in editing news beyond the ability to click a mouse. I don’t want people’s comments…if I do, I go to a blog regarding a specific subject. Please come up with a serious alternative!

Clearly, Netscape.com users are not very into Web 2.0. Hell, they wouldn’t go to the Netscape site if they were. These are ‘legacy users’ with no interest in being interactive. I think that’s something the Web 2.0 crowd has to learn - not every users wants to participate. Not every users is interested in seeing others participate. And Netscape users - they just want to see their old homepage because they don’t know how to change their browser defaults. So either Netscape is trying to get rid of those old users, or their trying to ‘educate’ them, but they resist.

That seems to be what Jason Calacanis doesn’t talk about in his blog post about this. Judging from the Alexa stats for netscape.com, it seems they will have to do something, though, because at best, it looks like traffic is stagnating. Not the best result for the AOL stockholders, is it?

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