This is a great example of how a collaborative social platform is hard to imitate. According to TechCrunch, Netscape will be shutting down its former ’social’ homepage. Tom Drapeau of AOL posted on Netscape’s blog stating:
“Visitors to Netscape.com will see a more traditional news experience very soon. …Many of you may remember that Netscape.com used to be much different than it is today. In fact, it used to contain more mainstream news before we shifted to the social news site you see now. We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled.”
Netscape.com’s portal was similar to Digg’s concept where the community was able to control what was made popular but it also featured an editorial layer monitoring the stories that made the front page. It has had limited success since last June, when it was introduced as a ’social experiment’ by Jason Calcanis (founder of WebLogs Inc).
Netscape made headlines when Jason announced on his blog that he was willing to pay $1000 to the top Digg, Reddit and Flickr users to start posting on Netscape. This move also created a small ’spat’ between Jason and Digg founder, Kevin Rose. Since then, Jason has left AOL and on Episode 2 of the GigaOM show, Kevin and Jason are interviewed by Om Malik where they discuss the similarities between the two sites.
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