Netscape, the five month-old Digg-clone experiment, is testing out two alternate home page designs with users in an attempt to increase the popularity of little-used topical categories.
I spoke with Jason Calacanis, who runs the Netscape property, earlier this evening about the tests (Jason wrote about the upcoming changes here). He said that Netscape is seeing heavy usage in the technology and politics categories, but the remaining 31 channels, ranging from Books to Women, are seeing less user news submissions and participation. Since the Netscape home page reflects the most popular stories from all categories at any given time, it is currently very heavily weighted towards tech and politics stories. This focus creates a self propogating system that continues to promote what is already popular.
The new layouts, described in a Netscape blog post, will instead show top stories from a variety of topical channels. The hope is that, once more varied stories hit the Netscape home page, these channels will become more popular.
The most interesting part of the story, however, are the comments users have left to the blog post linked above. When the author wrote “What do you think?” at the end of the post, users took it as an open door to say what they felt about Netscape in general. There seems to be a lot of frustration to vent, with commenters stating things like “It’s getting to the point where I’m just about ready to close my Netscape acct. altogether,” “I hate the new Netscape!,” and “The new Netscape is a big disappointment.” Of the 15 comments posted as of the time I am writing this, only four seem to be on the topic requested by the post author, none were strongly pro-Netscape and 9 were basically asking for the old Netscape portal back.
Welcome to the world of user generated content, Netscape users.
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Ah, the never-ending battle of techies versus neo-luddites.
With comments like those, i am sure about the amount of frustration with the techs of netscape, but everyone has their own opinion, you cant change it, the only way is to prove them wrong indiviadually and at the same time make their own presence on field.
Have to give them credit for still being around. They have a great name, need a slightly better logo - maybe put some AJAX chat into the digg idea and they’d be buried…
Sir Tim Berners Lee has been talking about the problems with blogging, I’ve written some notes about it
Seems like user generated content is great if only the darn users I would keep out of it.
Mike, where would we be if we judged TechCrunch the comments?
Wait until after the election - the politics section will see a sudden decrease of activity. (if you do some analysis, there are a handfull of people on Digg and Netcape that are doing all the politics posting). some of the best “digg bombing” has been done with political stories and proves that BOTH models are flawed and, IMHO, really not worth visiting.
I have to chuckle. In early October I did a short little post about Netscape’s neglected channels, in particular the Men channel, chiding the anchors for allowing a never ending series of spam posts by the same submitters. For a couple of days my post had more votes than any of the other posts in that channel, because it was the only post that wasn’t spam.
As long as they continue to get attention from sites like techcrunch they have a chance. Maybe they will find the winning formula… and even if they don’t they will probably get a lot of traffic from the curious who find their way back to netscape every once in a while just to see what’s up.
I know many people don’t like Jason, but this is probably a good move for netscape. One of the reasons I, and many others, don’t use Reddit anymore is because the stories submitted on Digg just end up on Reddit as well. The same is the case with netscape.
What Netscape is trying to do is be different from their much larger rivals. Digg is primarily a tech site, and so is Reddit. By shifting focus to non-tech related categories, netscape can channel into an audience that Digg might be alienating.
That said, I think they will still fail. Netscape is littered with ads; they should focus on gaining a huge following first, and afterwards add a few banners. Stop being greedy, the site is already bad enough.
- Jawad (Shuzak)
Looks like Netscape is trying to be everything to everyone. By diluting themselves down, I’m not sure they have enough “wow” to catch the the interest of most “first time” visitors.
This is Netscape, I would have thought if they wanted to increase posting activity to certain topic channels they just would have hired more people to post in them.
DavidEzra, they are carving a niche for themselves. It is exactly the sort of thing they need to survive. Netscape cannot compete with Digg (or even Reddit) in terms of tech news so they must take another route rather than stay stubborn.
Desperate times call for desperate measurements.
- Jawad (Shuzak)
It’s too bad netscape couldn’t become ’smarter’ and pull a google news personalized type thing where users could get a personalized page weighted to what they liked more to read / submit… I mean, that might not be popular with everyone, but it would be a fun option. Maybe a nice use of an API if there was one.
Netscape is making a mistake by changing things up. They never learn!
It will be interesting to see who first gets this wide-appeal angle right.
I’m pretty impressed that they let all the negative commentary through … it at least shows a clear intent to listen to their users and let others vent their frustrations as well.
Since it became a digg clone, netscape will better take a clear direction, unless it wants to disappear soon…
The only reason a site exists is to offer a service. If that service is provided by another website, even better, then there is no reason to exist.
If Netscape decides to take a specific path then it may have a chance.
Before the “new netscape” was launched the most popular channels by pageviews were Celebrity, News and Mens. Tech and Politics were never highly trafficed. The programming team programmed to the demographic. Its no surprise that after a radical change in programming that some users are alienated. I hope that the new team can find a way to keep loyal Netscape users happy while still finding an engine of growth
While netscape might have enough of a user base to compete with Digg I think it’s sad they couldn’t come up with their own look.
If you just look at the data:
http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....tscape.com
Netscape is sinking every month more. They should be feeling the heat…