On Thursday, AOL’s Netscape property will no longer be just another portal - it’s being converted into a Digg-killer. I was briefed on the new site by Jason Calacanis last week. As of tonight, he owns the Netscape property at AOL. The new site will run at beta.netscape.com for now, converting over to the main Netscape.com property soon.
It’s not exactly a Digg clone (home page screenshot here). Submitted stories are voted on in much the same way, and the more votes a story gets the higher it appears in a category home page or on Netscape.com itself. However, the top few spots in each category and on the home page are determined by an “anchor” - essentially an editor choosing from stories moving up the ranks.
There are 30 topical channels, from “Art & Design” to “Women”. Eight full time and eleven part time editors will manage the site, determining both the top stories as well as staffing a 24×7 chat room where users can discuss stories in real time.
The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space. According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views - far more than Digg today.
Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.
There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. Story submissions can be tagged by the submitter along for easier search in the future. Every category, user and group of friends has their own RSS feed. Also, category anchors will follow up on many stories and post their own editorial content on those stories (see screenshot here).
Any chance we can get a full size screenshot instead of a barely-viewable picture like the current one?
yes - http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.g.....038;size=o
I think they could have fit a few more ads on the site… but that is just me.
Cool. As Yahoo Answers has shown, when web 2.0 concepts get integrated and refined by the big boys, there is a chance to bring some cool stuff to people who otherwise wouldn’t have noticed. And Netscape’s traffic numbers are still massive, despite a very long decline.
eric, these sites run ads for a reason. They’re not just there to serve as a nuisance.
You can see the actual site at:
http://www.beta.netscape.com/
The 9pm PST deadline got pushed back? Boo.
Interesting that you need to register for the site, opposed to using the existing membership system AOL/Netscape runs. Probably because of the speedy development, but it would have been smart to integrate it in. If you’re getting 10M user sessions for free, why try and frustrate them by requiring another registration?
The site’s evidently running off of PHP and I’m guessing will have some growing pains. It’s already slowing down and it has only been live for a few minutes. According to the NYT much of the development happened in a crazy hotel coding session. Luckily it’s housed on beta.netscape.com for a few more weeks, otherwise the traffic would get really crazy.
Excellent, now people can *vote* on the trashy content they’re used to seeing on netscape.com. Strangely, voting on the hotness of the ‘daily bimbo’ on netscape.com was never considered ‘web 2.0′.
um, is it just me or are all the main links pointing to internal Netscape pages? The actual site where the content came from has a tiny “via” link. I don’t see how that’s going to be the equivalent of a Slashdotting or Digging. In fact, seems a bit too portal-ish for my tastes - keep the punters inside the netscape site.
@macmanus
looks like all stories are hosted on netscape.com in a frame. you can vote on anything though. i see some stories from joystiq, youtube, etc. only the ‘tiny link’ goes to the source - not really a great traffic generator per say…
@Nick Pang
‘per se’, not ‘per say’ …
@mic edwards
thanks for correcting my spelling
I’ll just buy it
and make it a LIVE product.
I’d never visit this site. It’s just another trashy copycat, but with ridiculous amounts of ads. All digg ever used is a small google ad-sense bar at the top of the site and they do fine. Then again, the revision3 guys are smart, not greedy asses. Also, I dislike the idea of an “anchor”, because that’s the same as having an editor for a regular news site, only he has all the work done for him by the visitors. With digg, it’s really in the hands of the people.
got enough ads? geez
Yeah, good luck on that, AOL.
(Note to self: using “killer” to describe your product usually means it will have almost no effect on its intended target.”)
Sounds like digg is in big troule.
finally someone is doing this. now i wont have to read about 3 stories on the front page about what someone did to their NES controller today. a cell phone wow! anchors can pick worthwhile stories while interesting stories that somone else stumbles on can also gain in popularity. thanks for saving me from the pricks at digg.com
“There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. ”
… Yes. A dozen obnoxious flashing GIF ads.
Seriously–could they possibly squeeze any more ads in there.
I’d have to tune up my Adblock extension quite a bit to survive at that site.
How about modifying these sites to block people who just mindlessly repost links to Engadget/Joystiq a day or two later. I think that would cut down on a lot of crap inserted into the digg feed.
Pshh.. your shit wont fly, AOL.
像AOL这样的公司能做出这个东西，给我们很大启示。至于中文的吗，看看
http://www.buzzcn.com
Looks like all the stars are out:
The one and only Bill Gates on these comments
http://www.zejn.si/~natan/666.html
Jason Calacanis with his pom poms rooting for AOL
http://www.google.com/services.....blogs.html
Wil “freakin’” Wheaton on Digg (guess he’s just a geek).
http://www.digg.com/technology.....gg-Killer_
“Any chance we can get a full size screenshot instead of a barely-viewable picture like the current one?”
Why, Don? Haven’t you gotten used to TechCrunch’s lovely miniscule thumbnails that you *CAN’T* click and expand into something viewable? It’d so chic!
justin makes excellent points. there was room for competition, because digg had a good idea but never opened it up outside the gaming community. netscape can now do what they should have done when aol bought them. now aol, bring back gnn!
I wonder if they tried looking at this in IE7?
Not a big deal for a beta launch though given IE/Netscape history I guess…
can techcrunch handle the AOLigg effect?
I’d personally say that the new Netscape holds more similarities with NewsVine than Digg, it will be interesting to see how well the site does compared with the established players in the field.
The netscape site isn’t as smooth as the Digg one, and for me, that plays a big part in which sites I come to. It’s the designer streak in me, or the vain one, I get mixed up
I’m also surprised netscape.com is still around, they’re like a fallen eagle on the web, akin to Real Networks (why is that still going as well??).
Easy to remember how Yahoo created its own social bookmarks stuff, then acquired the real toy.
I am not sure if there are other examples of clone-then-buy. Could be some kind of pattern.
-
Congrats for the 1-year mark.
surely it will be up to the users and visitors to decide if it’s a diggkiller?
not a bad design though - but way too much advertising. though possibly Americans are much more used to FAR FAR too much advertising than we are in Europe - I’m always totally amazed the sheer amount of ads that get thrown onto TV, radio, mags etc in the usa. We would find it offensive and tantamount to ‘junk’ - we tune it out.
But I expect Netscape and AOL have the media/ad space buyers and sellers all hooked up - so why care?
Looking forward to seeing the quality of news it throws my way - via a feed or two
Good point Kosso, I’ve seen that as well, Europeans have a far lower threshold for advertisment placement. I can’t watch American TV, there’s more adverts than content! I think we get a fairly healthy balance here in the UK, though there’s less channels around.
wow. i just went and had a good look around the beta site - still a few glitches in layout code (to be expected at this stage) but I have to say, it makes my eyes hurt - they have no idea where to look next! They were begging me to leave. Blessed be the tranquility of rss feeds.
The phrase that spings to mind (all too often recently) is ‘Attack of the Clones’ - sure there is *some* innovation there with the Anchors [no prizes for guessing what the detractors will call them, eventually
] - if only I could see through all those ads.
and if I see another clone of YouTube, I’m going to scream!
I’m just tickled by the fact that the third most popular story on the site at the moment is an anti-AOL rant by one of the many AOL ISP customers who encountered problems cancelling his sub…
This is going nowhere.
Check the sign up form:
http://flickr.com/photos/94136972@N00/167623898
1, 3, 4.
The fact that they put ads in the middle of the comments prior to getting the comments formating function even remotely close to working speaks volumes for the quality and goals of the site, IMHO.
This will just quicken the death of NS. (which as we all know has been a long slow dreadfull process)
Hmm, thats interesting.
A step up in terms of functionality from Digg possibly/maybe - but the ads may kill it and the heavy experience.
I built http://www.feedgeek.net to achieve similar sharing functionality for myself (other geeks wanted it, so its going online slowly)…
Look at all the noise (ads) all over the page, i think people still have not realize why sites like digg and google has attracted so much users, its because of how ads are displayed.
Massive digg killer …. hahahaha. Very funny title for sure.
Interestingly, the headlines seems to be less geeky. If it’s gonna stay that way, it could be a pretty decent differentiator.
But one thing turn out to be a deal-breaker for me: “visit the site” load the site on a frame. If they do that to encourage me to vote, that’s a bad design call. Doing it that way kills the experience. I’d much rather go back to previous browser tab to vote.
If the editorial panel can keep things less geeky than Digg, I agree, that will be a differentiator. Despite Digg’s popularity in certain circles, most people still have no idea what it is, and clearly a lot more people have heard of Netscape. The editorial panel can keep non-geeks interested enough to vote non-geek stories to the top and *shazaam* you have a broader reach than Digg.
Ha, what can I say? What a killer ! Yes, nice title.
Is Netscape.com really that much bigger? According to Alexa it’s way smaller than digg.com but i’ll admit that I don’t know how good Alexa-stats would work on a site like netscape.com.
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....tscape.com
All the ads make me sick
I just tried it.
Posted my story on ‘Hot Air Ballon rides over Loire Valley Castles’ from my blog ‘Serge the Concierge’
The sign up and submitting a story was a smooth process.
I put the story in their ‘Food and Travel’ section.
I will see if it brings me additional readers as Reddit, NowPublic and CraigsList do.
Take care
SERGE
Biz:
http://www.njconcierges.com
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com
It is a blend of Slashdot and Digg. It is a pity that AOL cannot show much innovation except adding a lot ads, even in the center of the comments!
Diggol http://diggol.com just launched with automatic discovery of topics important to each user, personalized ranking, a TopicMap graph showing topics and relations among topics, and the news pages are complete ad-free.
P.S. just curious, I thought a big part of Digg’s success comes from many people submitting stories. What motivates people to submitting stories to digg? These stories often do not link to their own site, so is it status? Hope someone can shed light on this.
There are a number of factors, not the least being that digg users feel compelled to share their interests with others (see the Friends feature, which is one of the most popular components of digg, though little discussed). There seems to be also a competitive streak, a desire to get your story promoted, and your name next to it as the discoverer.
I’ve talked to diggers, in particular “power diggers,” who do it out of a sense of community, and are tired of Big Media handing them their news from a short list.
Best of luck to all our clones… Just wait till v3.
-j
Too much crap everywhere; it’s so much more difficult to navigate through than Digg… Even delicious is more aesthetically pleasing.