A few weeks ago, we announced that the social news functionality was being removed from the Netscape Navigator Web browser in parallel with Netscape.com's transition to Propeller.com; at that same time, we promised that we'd release these features as standalone browser extensions.

We're making true on that commitment; the following social news features that had been standard components of early betas of Netscape Navigator 9 have now been reborn as browser extensions. These extensions are compatible with both Firefox 2 and Navigator 9:

• Propeller.com Friends' Activity Sidebar

• Propeller.com Sitemail Notifier

• Propeller.com Tracker
  

• Propeller.com News

The News and Tracker extensions are still available only in the Mozilla Addons sandbox; read this for more information about the sandbox.

We have just completed our planned changes to Netscape.com. As we originally reported, a new portal has been launched on Netscape.com, and the social news site previously located there has been moved to propeller.com.

Over the last week, we have received some very positive feedback, both from early social news adopters and from those who were gradually won over by the communal experience at Netscape.com. I want to thank you all for your great feedback, and want to reiterate that the Propeller social news experience is not going away. On the contrary! In the coming weeks, you will be able to see Propeller content on both the new Netscape.com portal, as well as AOL News.

We have not been neglecting our member feedback either. We do realize that there have been undue performance problems and a few technical glitches over the past few weeks. Let me apologize for this poor user experience, and assure you that we are hard at work in fixing these. We have also had more spam escape our filters lately, and I want to apologize for that as well, and give thanks to all of our great members who reported these stories as such.

Also, we are not happy to simply stand pat with our existing features. In the near future, we will be able to share information about our new social news platform, which we are extremely excited about. It will bring together the best of all worlds: a world class design team, an advanced website platform, and a host of new and interesting ways to enjoy social news.

Best of all, we won't rush the new social news site to the public. We will want to hear your opinion on the new site, as it is because of you, the newly named Propeller member base, that we continue to develop social news services. We really hope that the Netscape.com social news community will come visit Propeller.com. We are confident that you will feel right at home!

Netscape Community Update

We promised you in our last communication about the Netscape.com site that we would get right back to you about where your current social news site will live after we redirect to the new Netscape portal.

The Netscape social news experience that you are currently using today will be migrated and revealed soon at http://www.propeller.com/. We're working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination.


It is important to us that you feel empowered to choose how you want to consume your news and participate in the community. As we mentioned in a recent post, the Netscape.com site will soon be redirected to the new Netscape portal, a more traditional and editorially-driven news experience. It's already live, so you can check it out now if you haven't already. You'll notice some elements of our social news site there in short order, so that it will be easy for you to go back and forth and engage in each if you like.

Please continue to check back with us on the Netscape blog (or subscribe to our RSS feed for real time information), as we'll be keeping you in the know about when you can expect to see the Netscape social news site up and running at http://www.propeller.com/.

Our goal is to allow you to continue to share and communicate with each other around the news stories of interest to you, so you can anticipate that the social news site will be coming sooner than later.

We appreciate the patience of our community members as we make these adjustments to better provide you with the options that you deserve.

~ The Netscape Team

To the Netscape Community...

There are some upcoming changes to the Netscape.com site that we hope will improve your experience. We'll be providing two different news options for you based on what you've told us over the past few months.

Visitors to Netscape.com will see a more traditional news experience very soon. Don't worry, the social news site isn't going away! We will keep you updated on where you will be able to find the social news site as we get closer to making the switch.

Why is this happening?

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. 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.

The decision to redirect the current Netscape.com site is based on that feedback and our desire to better serve our community.

Now where can you go?

You have the power to decide!

Have you visited the new Netscape portal experience yet? It's already up and running. If you bookmarked the current Netscape.com site, this is where you'll land once we make the transition. We just launched it recently, so we'll be busy making improvements along the way.

From checking your mail to local weather updates to the latest news headlines to celebrity gossip, you'll find it here.

If the social news experience is more your style, rest assured that we'll be rolling out a site for you in the very near future. You may have read a bit about our plans for the social news site in the press already. We will be sure to communicate specific dates and additional information on the new social news destination in this blog, so stay tuned.

What does this mean for the Netscape browser?

Absolutely nothing will change. The only area that will be affected is Netscape.com. Anything else associated with the Netscape brand will remain the same.

How can you stay in the know about the upcoming social news site?

We want to keep you as up to date as possible as we work to provide the best news experience for you. Please be sure to check back on the Netscape blog frequently, as we'll be updating with new developments. Most importantly, we'll be providing you the new location for the social news site.

We, as a company, remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users. This move is an effort to make both the former portal experience and the social news experience accessible so that you can decide which you prefer--or, even better, that you want to participate in both.

We look forward to unveiling a new social news site as soon as possible. The ability to post, comment, rate and share the news that's most relevant to you is as important to us as it is to you. We will be maintaining an open dialogue with you, our users, so that you'll be the first to know as soon as we're ready to pull back the curtains.

Netscape 9 will include built-in tools to share, vote for, and discuss interesting things you find on the Web directly from the browser's URL bar. The image below shows the state of the address bar for a page that

a) hasn't been submitted to Netscape.com
b) has been submitted and you haven't voted for it
c) has been submitted, and you have already voted for it.


The vote and comment totals are shown in the tooltips for the images as well as in the status bar.

We feel that having these tools in the browser by default will introduce the idea of social news to a whole new set of users, and it should make it easier for those who are already familiar with the concept.

If you check out the right-hand column on Netscape or our About page, you'll notice that we have some new Navigators on the team. We've brought on 7 new Navigators for a total of 23 Navigators helping us make Netscape the best social news experience we can. Even better news, we're still hiring! Our plan is to continue adding new Navigators until we have a fully fleshed out team of people skilled in finding good stories and news and promoting the growth of a community as rich and varied as the Netscape community. If you're a top contributor to a social bookmarking or news site, a top blogger, or a top member of Netscape itself and you're interested in joining our team of freelance cool-hunters, then please email ryan at new netscape dot com with your details. He'll get in touch with you, and we'll see where the conversation takes us.

Our new Navigators are:

Jeremytoday, who has been one of the most prolific members on the site, and we're happy to have him on board.
Fedquip, who besides being a regular contributor to Netscape and Reddit, runs Throw Away Your TV.
Aidenag, who has been a top Digg user for quite some time and whose addition to Netscape caused a bit of a stir over at Digg.
MikeF, who we hope will bring his experience from FreeIndie.Com to breathe new life into our Music Channel.
Idyll, who for a long time now has been a top user over at Reddit, where she is currently ranked #4 all time.
GregD, who runs TreeLimb.org and is considered by many to be a top Digg user.
Pagey, who is also known as GeekForLife over at Digg, where he is a top user.

Please join me in welcoming them all aboard!

Since we re-launched Netscape, one of our constant struggles has been to make the homepage one of the best experiences it can be for a social news website. Initially, the homepage was dominated by stories from the Technology and Gadget channels, as early adopters of the site were either technophiles and/or people who were used to Digg and who came over to either kick the tires or try to in some way sabotage or break what they (incorrectly, I think) saw as a site trying to become another Digg. We began trying to grow other channels like News and Politics, and we succeeded in getting members involved in those Channels, but, as a result, the site has become overly focused on Politics and partisan disagreements propel most hot point political stories to the top of the pile and crowd out a lot of other interesting stories from other topic areas.

Our goal has always been to provide a new experience. To build a social news site on top of a portal experience with an editorial layer providing original content and follow up metajournalism in the form of Anchor Commentary. We want Netscape to become the best marriage between what new media, citizens media, traditional journalism, television news, and blogging has to offer. We want it to be an evolution of news and an evolution of the portal. Evolution takes time.

With that in mind, we've come up with a few alternate views of the Netscape Homepage that we'd like you to consider:

• http://www.netscape.com/hometest/ This first variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 10 Channels at any given time, and then it pulls the top 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and the top 2 stories from each of the next 5 channels and ranks these stories on the Homepage. As a result, no single channel will ever have more than 3 stories on the homepage, but only the top 10 channels will ever appear in the rankings.
• http://www.netscape.com/hometest1/ This second variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 25 Channels at any given time, and then it displays the top story from each of those channels and ranks them.

We think both these variant homepages give more balance to the site as a whole, provide a wider variety of information, help people who have less interest in Politics a chance to have their stories rise to the top, and encourage everyone to check out the individual channels, rather than always living on the homepage. What do you think? Would you prefer one of these views over the current homepage? Do you have an idea for another way we could display the homepage?

We'll take whatever you say into consideration and if we change to one of these views, we'll announce it beforehand and keep the previous view around as an alternate.