Joe Hayes {dot} Org

For those not familiar with Netscape, the company garnered it’s popularity back in the mid 90’s with it’s web browser (Netscape Navigator), at the time the most commonly used version for web surfing. Navigator lost much of it’s market share after the first browser war with Microsoft, and Netscape was eventually purchased by AOL and have devoted themselves to improving the browser.

Fast foward to recent times, where in an effort to grab ahold of the open source, “web 2.0” crowd the Netscape crew decided to delve into the Social Networking scene with a Digg type clone. While many Netscape users were familair and happy with their current news portal (pretty much a rip of the AOL homepage), eventually it caught on and appeared to be growing in popularity as of late - showing a slight increase in traffic according to Alexa, the first time since late 2004 when it went on what seemed to be a never-ending plunge in traffic rankings.

So why am I writing this? We’ll, the social networking news site is going bye-bye, in their own words:

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.

Which makes perfect sense. Netscape’s gain in popularity by using their branding to grow a social media site is actually hurting their browser’s branding (which is what made them popular to begin with). So what happens to their growing userbase? Welcome to Propeller. Don’t bother following the link for a few weeks from this post, as the site’s not likely up (as of today).

Good move or bad? Time will tell, obviously there’s a desire to have another social networking site like Digg, though aimed at all markets. Shoutwire was a failure - likely due to the childish moderating, over monetization including annoying pop-ups,  and pornography advertisements (among other things). Other social media sites just don’t have what it takes (although many are still insanely popular - this niche is screaming for a leader), like Reddit - great site but’s stuck in 1985, SumbleUpon - another great concept but lacking in community, and a host of others but mostly geared towards the technology market (remember Slashdot? Well, it’s still alive).

I sincerely hope that Netscape does well with the launch of Propeller. They’ll likely port the large userbase over from Netscape and (hopefully) most of the community will follow it over there. They’ve only got one shot. I’d like to see at least a portion of the new Netscape news portal dedicated to showing the latest headlines from Propeller, that’s an important way to maintain value for those users contributing and alsohelping to  develope an ”authority” for the new site. As a webmaster myself, I’ve been using Netscape for a while to find new interesting content to talk about and recenty became very active in their community. See my profile.

Only time will tell if Netscape is successful, if they’re not I hope another site steps up. The web does, in fact, need a great social media site that caters to the average internet user.