Netscape Relaunched as AOL Digg
AOL and their Savior, Jason Calacanis, have transformed the once Mozilla powered browser, ISP and homepage brand; Netscape, into a wild and whacky multi-tier version of Digg for AOL users. Sure, using the succesful Digg social news sharing, commenting and ranking model for mass AOL news may seem like a questionable idea from the beginning, but it follows the succesful adaptation into social media that Yahoo has directed itself into.
AOL News is the 4th most popular Internet news channel on the web, and the Digg model, which is available for tweaking and customization in the form of multiple open source applications, is a proven success. For as high browed and techie as the Digg audience maybe, at its core Digg is quite a simple web tool. Problem is, as long as the Digg model is being used for tech, engineering and Valley oriented themes; it’s never going to spread onto the browser of the common Internet user.
That is the genius behind AOL’s new Netscape (Beta), it’s Web 2.0 for Bingo Moms, Coupon Clippers, Ford Drivers and Shake & Bake conneisseurs.
Netscape now brings social interactive news to those who will get a kick out of voting, commenting and submitting stories on themes ranging from Cars to Sex, Celebrities to Politics, Pets to Baseball. With the amount of time spent on these sites due to their stickiness, consider AOL’s Netscape to be a media seller’s dream.
Even better, the attraction of Digg to site owners, marketers, and link builders will be even more widespread with Netscape. It is the Digg, or the Fark, for all walks of life. With millions of US bloggers and MySpacers, expect Netscape to catch on as asocial marketing and blog traffic building tool for the other bloggers out there… the 99% who do not write about search engines, TechCrunch, Google or venture capital.
Jason is covering the Netscape Beta launch on his blog, calacanis.com and notes:
Of course, in the first hour of being open we get tested by a bunch of DIGG users who voted up a story about a horrible AOL user experience–to the second position!
We’ve started doing metajournalism on the first wave of stories already… this is a real test of our integrity.
Comments
3 responses so far ↓
Ping Liang on Jun 15, 2006 at 11:51 am
I thought a big part of Digg’s success comes from many people submitting stories. Seeing how Netscape trying to keep the traffic to within netscape, large fonts title linked internal, only tiny fonts linked to the source, it does not motivate people submitting stories. Also, there are too ads, even in the center of the comments!
Plus, they do not have personalized pages for individual users.
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.
Doug Sherrets on Jun 18, 2006 at 1:13 am
Hi,
It would be nice to have a website like Netscape drive traffic to other kinds of bloggers given you are absolutely right much is catered to the subject of technology.
With respect to Netscape getting there, I raise some points you may find interesting. I am reposting it below:
Hello,
I believe there are some major issues Netscape needs to address as part of their “Digg-killer.” Below is what I posted on my blog here from 2 days ago:
http://www.mrmarkets.com/2006/06/netscapes_diggk.html
Title: Netscape’s Digg-killer control may work, but needs community to have a future
Body: So Jason Calacanis is leading the charge to overthrow Digg with his killer Netscape product. For now, it’s in beta, and I hope they slowly roll it out, otherwise it could die. Why? Look at MySpace Video that was thrust upon users, experienced brief popularity, then fizzled out. The problem was that they did not water the community to grow any sort of roots. The result was a weed that lived, but died at the hand of the YouTube RoundUp spray. My point in no uncertain terms is that Netscape needs to attract the people who are going to provide valuable content and get them locked-in to the site somehow.
Surely that is easier said than done given Digg has already attracted quite a number of those people. Digg has done its part to create social and community functions that make leaving Digg for another community, especially under the technology category, to be a bit hard. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Netscape could certainly add more social components, such as really emphasizing that people uploading stories do a good job about linking to their respective social network profiles, providing a picture and listing information about themselves. Weaving social connections by encouraging adding yourself as a “fan” of someone who posts is a good way to make someone who posts a lot feel appreciated.
Additionally, there should be some system for identifying the star-performers on the site. On digg, some people who tend to get a lot of stories posted on the front page seem a little bit sketchy. After all, some do not really share a lot of information about themselves, and just as easily could be spammers looking for kicks in driving their pet links to the top, or trying to build a link farm based off of making a particular page about the “top 10 ways to make your website super popular” get a bunch of links via digg in order to pump its Google Juice up and get more organic search rankings.
Clearly, such nefarious characters have no role in this kind of news community. To the point, Netscape needs a weighting system that considers the people who are voting for a particular person. Netscape ought to look at IP, number of times the people voting have posted their own stories, number of fans those people have, and so forth to come up with some kind of formula in order to ascertain a probability that a particular person is gaming the system.
In short, if you game the system, you should not be highly ranked as a semi-celeb on Netscape. Another way to patrol is simply to use the “anchors” or moderators on the site so if a person has a story banned, then that person’s standing on the site is a bit reduced. Of course this assumes good behavior by the moderators, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption.
The real issue Netscape needs to address is the problem with pushing too much traffic on a community. They need to lock-in community upstanding individuals by encouraging profile creation, similar to how YouTube locked in its critical site leaders. Moves by YouTube have enabled it to retain the people who upload a lot of content, to the detriment of services like MySpace Video, which is struggling. Calacanis needs to really think about how to attract and retain top talent to ensure the community does not collapse under its own weight. Even Digg, which draws significantly fewer people than Netscape.com per month, has shown strains as a result of spammers on the site.
But perhaps the moderators are all Netscape needs. Perhaps Digg founder Kevin Rose’s commitment to not messing with Digg listings is a sort of innovator’s dilemma: that approach brought him success, so he does not want to risk alienating his user base by changing. As Kevin waits, Netscape launches and could solve the problem, permitting the Netscape service to produce better results despite being subjected to a much larger community.
Ultimately, if Netscape proves the model, they will certainly need strong community functions in order to withstand the onslaught of competitors that would inevitably emerge from the most highly trafficked websites.
What do you think? Will Digg survive? Is Netscape missing something here? Post in the comments.
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Search Engines WEB on Jun 18, 2006 at 8:29 pm
Digg’s success is it’s interactivity with the public directly - it is VERY rewarding to submit and see your submissions be appreciated by DIGGs
Netscape’s model adds a middle layer - that takes away the personalization
People not only want to Vote - they want the OPTION of contributing easily and directly then getting recognized specifically for good contributions.
That appears to also be the reason for the popularity of Blogs
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