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AOL takes a shot at social news
AOL has unveiled a beta of its new Netscape homepage. The page aims to take social bookmarking to a new level, breaking out of the current technology and web focus on services such as DiggDel.icio.us.
Social bookmarking site rely on users to vote for a submit stories to the service. The more votes or submissions, the higher a link will show up on the service's front page.
Digg is currently by far the largest social bookmarking site so it's to be expected that people refer to the new Netscape as a potential Digg killer. Ultimately the users will decide on that.
At first glance however, Digg has little to be worried about. I instantly understood the service the first time I visited Digg. The site has a clean design that steers visitors to the content that they are looking for.
The Netscape service is flashing and blinking on all sides and the abundance of banner ads get in the way of the content.
Signing up is easy and intuitive and has some nice features – it uses Ajax to instantly validate if your desired user name is available for instance. Submitting a story too went just fine, but Netscape failed in the ultimate test: voting for recently submitted stories.
There is no way to vote for a story in the queue without clicking on it. Users are alos unable to view submissions for a single, particular category (don't make the mistake of clicking on the 'channels' because that gets you to the front page of that section, not the submission queue).
Netscape can iron out these minor issues, but it demonstrates a larger problem: the company is too eager to capitalize the service with banner ads and doesn't understand what makes an social bookmarking service great.
You can copy a website, but you can't copy Web 2.0 understanding.
June 15, 2006 at 05:54 PM | Permalink
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