Netscape Revert to Being a Portal Again
While Jason Calacanis’ digg-clone at netscape.com was an interesting experiment, it never attracted a lot of users. Today, AOL announced that it will revert the site to being a pretty standard portal site – the kind we all used in the mid-nineties.
Adario Strange at Wired has two ideas about what this can mean:
1) the first signs of the format’s demise, or more likely 2) a return to less risk taking at AOL as it struggles to define itself under new management.
I don’t think the social news format is struggling, however, it is a format that doesn’t work for everybody and everything. When it comes to ‘hard’ news (war in Iraq, economy etc.), I don’t care about what other people think is the coolest thing to read right now. If I want to know about that, I can read digg or reddit for that. When it comes to ‘real’ news, timely delivery and good editorial control are still worth something. Calacanis himself after all is now doing a project that is all about editorial control.
Is AOL taking less risk these days? I have no idea. But any good company should try to salvage a sinking brand, I think. If AOL determined that Netscape.com didn’t work in its current iteration, then I can’t blame them for trying to fix the problem.
When I first heard of the idea, I didn’t think Netscape’s users were ready for this experiment. Let’s not forget the old joke about who uses Netscape as a portal: it is mostly users who don’t know how to change the homepage on the browser. Maybe the problem with the new Netscape was a generational thing as well. Let’s see how the new version will do.
Technorati tags: calacanis, digg, netscape
