Netscape Spins the Propeller
After a week or so of swirling rumors, it has been revealed that Netscape is going to move its “social news experiment” (read = Digg clone) to a new URL at www.propeller.com. Meanwhile, Netscape.com will revert back to its old school portal roots.
In my view what all of this means is as yet unclear. The big question:
* Will Netscape spin the propeller once and leave it to its own devices?
The major players in the social news space are Reddit, Digg, and Netscape. If Netscape is left to wither and die (think = Myspace News… shudder) it will basically be exiting a space that I strongly believe has an enormous future that is just in its very opening stages. So it will be very interesting to see if AOL puts money and resources behind Propeller, or if the rebranding is simply a subtle way to get rid of it.
Netscape scout Muhammad Saleem is enthused about the news at any rate, while Mathew Ingram perceptively asks why the announcement was made ahead of the new site launch.
Referring to the announcement, written by Tom Drapeau, Ingram also fires off a great one-liner in noting that “at least Jason Calacanis knew how to market something with a little energy.”
Meanwhile, back at AOL/Netscape headquarters, you have to wonder why they’re putting their eggs more firmly back into the portal basket. Sure, a bunch of longtime AOL subscribers and ancient Internet users who hearken back to the Netscape browser days might enjoy finding their news and information in one place… but they can already do this at AOL.com.
I can’t help thinking that Netscape as social news engine is an experiment that is being killed before its time.
That said, like most experiments it has its imperfections. The site design and user interface is clunky, the decision to pay people to submit stories controversial (which isn’t necessarily bad), and the site performance is at times frustratingly slow (which is inexcusable for a large commercial site well past its launch).
But the mix of human editors and user submitted and voted upon stories is the future of online news, which translates more broadly to the future of news. It’s just that simple. I firmly believe that the vast majority of online news sites (social and “traditional”) will be doing some hybrid of this, and probably much sooner than later.
Netscape is (or was) the only large site experimenting in such a way, which means it had the pole position to become a major online news leader.
Maybe Propeller can spin its way to such a position, but I’m not optimistic at the moment.
