Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel.

TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot.

• Sphere It
• 

When Netscape announced they were shuttering their iconic Internet browser last month, they recommended to users that they consider moving over to Firefox: “We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try. We know you’ll enjoy it!” (they also gave instructions for migrating from Netscape to Firefox). That makes sense, since Mozilla spun out of Netscape originally.

Today, however, they split their endorsement. In a blog post titled “Netscape Recommends Flock, Too,” Netscape’s Richard Klein describes Flock as “Firefox with social integration” and gives it his thumbs up.

The only problem is that Netscape has next to no actual users left to make these recommendations to - less than 1% market share. Flock must love the endorsement, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on actual downloads.

We’re fans of Flock here, too (Duncan gushes, whereas I think its excellent but very slow sometimes). Personally, I’m finding Firefox 3 for the Mac the best, fastest and most stable browser I’ve ever used.

• Sphere It
• 

Please observe a moment of silence for the Netscape browser. Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, will die on February 1, 2008. AOL, which acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion, will announce today that they will discontinue development of the browser, currently on version 9.

In an email exchange yesterday with Tom Drapeau, Director of AOL/Netscape development, he said that only a handful of AOL engineers are still tasked with keeping the browser updated. Most of their efforts have been aimed at creating a Netscape-skinned version of Firefox with the Netscape look and feel.

The team has been unable to gain any significant market share against Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This, of course, is the same browser that once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial.

Drapeau says AOL’s transition into an ad-supported web business leaves little room for any real effort at maintaining and evolving the Netscape Browser.

He also points to the success of the non-profit Mozilla foundation, which spun off of Netscape in February 1998 with $2 million in funding from Netscape and an additional $300,000 from Mitch Kapor. Firefox, which is part of Mozilla, brought in nearly $70 million in 2006 revenues, mostly from a search deal with Google. In a sense, Netscape lives on through the open-source efforts of Mozilla and Firefox.

Support for existing versions of Netscape Navigator will cease on February 1, 2008. After that, users can visit the UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum for support.

AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, without any support.

I sadly place the first browser I ever used into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

• Sphere It
• 

Social voting remained a popular past time in 2007 with sites such as Digg more than tripling their audience, but some sites fared better than others according to data from comScore.

One name with a long history is the AOL owned Netscape.com. The site was relaunched in June 2006 as a Digg clone with high hopes that a new generation would use the once great brand as an alternative to Digg. The strategy failed dismally, but the termination in the end was even worse. From November 2006 through to August 2007 (the last full month as a Digg clone) Netscape’s traffic dropped from 305 million pages views a month to 137 million, a 55.1% drop in 9 months. AOL dumped social voting on Netscape September 19, and things went from bad to worse, with traffic dropping in August from 137 million page views to a dismal 38 million in November, down 72.3%.

The new home for the Netscape social voting experiment Propeller performed reasonably, but failed to capture most of Netscape’s previous social voting audience. With 13 million pages views (according to comScore) in November 07, Propeller has managed to pick up less than 10% of Netscape’s August audience.

The big winner once again in the social voting space was Digg. Starting at 11 million page views in November 2006, Digg saw a 318% increase in traffic to 46 million 12 months later. Reddit fared well increasing from 2 million page views in February 2007 (the first month it was big enough to be recorded by comScore) to 9 million in November, although October was a highpoint with 16 million page views.

• Sphere It
• 

Traffic on AOL’s Netscape portal has plummeted since the site dumped its social news voting model and reverted to a new portal, at least according to Alexa.

Unfortunately the comScore figures for Netscape aren’t yet available for September so we can’t confirm the traffic crash, but despite Alexa’s argued issues the crash in traffic as shown by Alexa is unlikely to be an Alexa only quirk.

Tony Hung, who first picked up on the traffic crash notes that “[the traffic crash] validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.” He’s right.

If Alexa is to be believed, Netscape’s traffic is now at its lowest level ever and ranks at a miserly 2,200th, a far cry from the days where Netscape was in the top 10 destinations online or even in the Top 600 during its time as a Digg clone. Some one at AOL may have some explaining to do given that the decision destroyed the traffic (and value) of Netscape by over 50%.

• Sphere It
• 

AOL has announced that Propeller.com will be the new home for the Netscape social media experiment. What was once considered a possible Digg-killer is now relegated to the backwaters of AOL.

In a statement, Tom Drapeau said that AOL was “working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination,” which given the site isn’t live yet is code for we eventually found a spare domain to rid ourselves of our Digg clone.

It might be too early to Deadpool the Netscape Social news experiment yet, but without the type-in traffic and brand recognition of the Netscape name, the whole idea will struggle to survive; after all the Netscape name, and previously Jason Calacanis’ evangelism was really all the site had going for it. I’ve heard some unconfirmed reports that since the initial announcement the site has been bleeding staff and contributors as well; I give it 12 months max, or AOL flogging Propeller off during this time for a fairly low sum.

• Sphere It
• 

We’ve known about it for weeks (despite Netscape’s claims that our post was innacurate), but now it’s confirmed: AOL has announced the end of Netscape as a social news portal.

In a statement, Tom Drapeau spun the decision as being AOL listening to its customers and as part of their “desire to better serve our community.” On the decision itself, Drapeau stated:

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

The new (old) Netscape home page is not live quite yet, but can be viewed at netscape.aol.com. All traffic to Netscape.com will shortly be redirected to this site.

Drapeau claims that the social news service will go on at a new site, but failed to name the site or when it would be launched; certainly not a good sign for the current Netscape editorial team.

• Sphere It
• 

We’ve gotten an update on the controversial post we wrote earlier this month on the possible shutdown of the fourteen-month-old old Digg-clone Netscape. Too many AOL execs have had their eye on the Netscape.com domain name, which brings in 3 million or so page views per day. The most likely scenario - The current home page at aol.netscape.com becomes the default page for Netscape.com, and the year old digg-clone moves to a new domain.

We hear that wow.com, a domain previously owned by Compuserve and acquired by AOL, is a potential landing place for the Netscape service. AOL may have different plans for wow.com, however, and the Netscape portal may land somewhere else. Either way, look for a link or module from the old service to remain on the netscape.com domain after the changeover.

We also expect to hear about material layoffs at AOL in the next six weeks, possibly as much as 15% of the 16,000 strong workforce. Next week the senior execs are supposed to be notified of the exact size of the cuts and whether they are targeted to specific business groups or across the board cuts.

• Sphere It
• 

AOL is considering killing off the “Digg Clone” social news site that they launched a little over a year ago at Netscape.com, and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead. One source says it’s a done deal. Another says no final decisions have been made. But the Netscape editorial team is rumored to be completely freaked out, and they are starting to talk to outsiders. Either way, take a good look at that screen shot to the right. It may be the last chance you have to see the service.

It’s unclear as to why the site might be scrapped or changed. Netscape.com and netscape.aol.com are controlled by different groups with AOL. At the very least a turf war of some kind is playing a part. And since Netscape’s primary champion, Jason Calacanis, left the company late last year to start a new company, it may leave the social news property without enough clout to protect itself.

See this announcement on Netscape.com that some of the traditional portal/news features are being incorporated into the site. One source says this is a testing of the waters to gather data for a final decision:

Just launched this week, there is a new AOL.com site available for the Netscape Community. Over the past year, there has been a lot of feedback regarding some of the features of the previous Netscape.com site that have gone away, and this site hopes to being some of that functionality back. Check it out!

Update: An AOL spokesperson carefully comments below.

Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do.

The message doesn’t address the issue head on. In fact it is sort of content-free. Saying “community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception” followed by “you can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do.” This is very different from saying that they are not closing netscape.com as we know it. Clarification is requested. See this comment as well from Tom Drapeau, who runs the current Netscape site. He’s also clearly annoyed by this post.

Update2: long Netscape blog post on the subject, still no denial but they are seriously annoyed with this post. Note to AOL: I can’t help it if people inside AOL/netscape are chattering about this to me. And all these vague responses tell me clearly that a real debate is going on internally about the fate of netscape.com. It’s actually a good thing that people are chatting about you. Look at some of the leaks at Google and Yahoo and all the stuff that gets out about them. This means that AOL may be starting to become relevant again to the early adopters. Silver lining and all that.

• Sphere It
• 

Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.

Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”.

But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.

BlinkList
BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks
Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank
CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape
Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.

Newsvine
Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed

OpenServing
OpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit
Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users, but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

Spotback
Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex
Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users.

• Sphere It
•