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.

To avoid confusion between the different Netscape products, we have made the decision that the next Netscape-branded browser (previously known only as Netscape 9) will be named Netscape Navigator 9. What's old is new again!

You may ask, "Won't this be confusing as well, since a number of Netscape.com users are known as Navigators?" Yes, that would be confusing. We'll have to do something about that...

Twitter (for those of you who have not yet been indoctrinated into the cult) is a new type of social networking that lets you keep in touch with friends by posting 140-character answers to the question, "What are you doing right now?" Different members of the Twitter community use Twitter for different things. You might use it to send messages to a group of friends about your weekend whereabouts, or to solicit information about a new product or service that you've been thinking about trying out. A lot of Twitter users use the platform as a "microblog"--essentially, to post the same sorts of thoughts they'd post on a traditional blog, but condensed into short, rapid-fire bursts. If you have a Twitter account, you can befriend other members of the community, and receive their updates (or "twits") on your cellphone, via instant messenger, and/or by visiting the Twitter web page.



Last week, Netscape set up a Twitter account linked to our main RSS feed. This means that every time a new story hits the Netscape homepage, everyone who is following the Netscape Twitter receives a message about it. If you're already a Twitter user and want to receive these updates, you can add the Netscape Twitter here. If haven't yet tried Twitter but would like to, you can sign up for an account at this link. If you have any questions about the Netscape Twitter, let us know in the comments to this post.

As some of you may already have noticed, we have stopped marking stories as having hit the homepage for the purposes of showing them on a member's stat page, under "Homepage Stories" (shown in Figure 1).

We are reevaluating our homepage configuration, as well as the calculation of member site rankings. Once we have finished our investigation, the idea of "Homepage Stories" may very well become obsolete.

If you have thoughts on the matter, submit them to: feedback@newnetscape.com. Kindly add a subject line of: "Homepage Stories counts" so we can find them quickly. We will not respond to any of the feedback directly, but will use the feedback in our discussions.

We will leave the module up for the time being, but will not add any new stories to these listings until we have made a decision on the future of this statistic.

Figure 1: An Example "Homepage Stories" display, seen here.

We're pleased to announce the 8.1.3 release of the Netscape Browser (Windows only). New in this version are security updates to the 8.1.x browser line - see the Security Alerts page at browser.netscape.com for more information on the bugs fixed in this release.

Remember to uninstall your current 8.x installation from the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs dialog before installing 8.1.3. Your profile information will remain intact and will be recognized by the new 8.1.3 installation.

Download and install Netscape 8.1.3 today!

First off, a big thank you to all of the Netscape members that have submitted great feedback on the new My.Netscape site. We are evolving by leaps and bounds, and you are a big part of that evolution. Thanks!

One of the most consistent pieces of feedback that we have received thus far is that we should look into allowing people to log in using their AOL accounts that are currently used for Netscape/AOL mail, were once used for the previous My.Netscape site, and are used throughout the AOL network.

You sent this feedback, and we have been listening. In conjunction with AOL announcing its role as an OpenID provider, and spurred by the rapid pace by which OpenID is being adopted on the Web, on Monday, March 26th, Netscape will not only support signing in with your current AOL screen name, but also OpenID as a way of accessing Netscape.com and My.Netscape.

How does this all work?

In order to log in using your AOL screen name (or other OpenID), you will need to establish an account on Netscape.com. You can use an account already created, and associate an AOL screen name/OpenID with it, or create a new account, already associated with an AOL screen name/OpenID.

Figure 1 - New signup page, you will see options for signing up just to Netscape.com aka "Start from Scratch", signing up via AOL screen name, and signing up via OpenID.




You will notice that in introducing AOL Screen Name/OpenID sign in, that the registration form for Netscape accounts has been dramatically simplified. This simplification was a result from feedback gathered over the lifetime of the new Netscape.com site.

Why did I need to do all this, it seems just as complicated as before to sign up?

The usefulness of these new updates really comes into play after signup, when a member needs to log into Netscape.com or My.Netscape. This process is made even easier if you are already logged into the AOL network / OpenID provider. Take a look:

Figure 2 - Logging in via AOL Screen Name, not currently logged into the AOL network





Figure 3 - Logging in via AOL Screen Name while logged into the AOL network. If you are already logged into the AOL network, you can sign in just by entering your screen name!



Choosing to trust the AOL Screen Name / OpenID provider, indicated by "Remember this site" or "Trust this site" checkboxes/buttons on participating sites, can make login quite painless, even virtually automatic.

We at Netscape hope that these new changes help to ease the registering for new accounts, and also help give more sign in options to members. We are, as always, gathering feedback on making Netscape.com and My.Netscape better services, and hope that this contributes positively towards that goal.

We have received an invitation to have a Netscape engineer sit on the RSS Advisory Board, and have chosen to send Chris Finke, one of our senior engineers. We are excited to have Netscape representation on the board. As one of the original RSS innovators, Netscape looks forward to helping to shape the future of the standard.

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.

Ever tried to visit google.cmo? How about irs.gvo? I'm sure that everyone has, at one time or another, made common mistakes like these when typing addresses in the location bar. What normally happens is that you notice your mistake after waiting for the page to load and it fails. That wait is a waste of your time - your browser spell-checks everything else you type, why not URLs?

Netscape 9 will be the first major browser to automatically correct common typos entered in the location bar. For example, if you accidentally type techcrunchcom, Netscape will fix it be to techcrunch.com. If you type slashdot.orgg, Netscape will change it to slashdot.org. mozilla,cmo gets changed to mozilla.com, and so on and so forth - no fuss, no muss. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation), hopefully saving you some time and frustration in the process.

Here at Netscape, we're constantly trying to improve the experience for all users, from casual visitors to hardcore community members. At the moment we're reevaluating some of the site mail features. While that's going on, we've decided to disable one feature in particular: the "All Mutual Friends" box in the Send a Message interface. Why? For one thing, we've gotten frequent complaints from members about spam. So we're looking for the best balance between social networking tools and potential headaches for the community. In two weeks we'll figure out whether to bring back the "All Mutual Friends" box, disable it permanently, or perhaps modify it. If you have any opinions on the issue or suggestions to make, feel free to message me. Your ideas are always welcome.

After last week's announcement, many of you inquired about the target platforms for Netscape 9. The previous version of Netscape (8.x) was only available for Windows, but the news that I have to bring this week is that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Because there's not much else to say on the topic of operating system compatibility, here is a bonus teaser: Below is a screenshot of an FTP page rendered in two different browsers. Can you guess which one is Netscape 9? :-)

What you are looking at is a draft of the main toolbar of Netscape 9.0, running on Windows XP.

Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser, and from this screenshot, you can infer several things: unlike Netscape 8, Netscape 9 will contain more standardized support for newsfeeds (a.k.a. Live Bookmarks); it will also have tight integration with the Netscape.com service, as evidenced by the icons for the two available Netscape.com extensions (Friends' Activity Sidebar and the Sitemail Notifier). Several Netscape.com-based extensions will be built into the browser; only these two have been previously announced.

I'll be posting a new announcement, feature teaser, or progress report right here each Tuesday, so stay tuned.

Earlier this week, I wrote about our decision to stop hosting the DTD for RSS 0.91 after July 1, 2007. Since then, we have received a torrent of feedback from users in both support and opposition to our plan. Based on this feedback, we have decided to host this file indefinitely. We apologize for any headaches our initial announcement might have caused.

Nonetheless, if you're a content producer using RSS 0.91 and you are at all concerned about your feeds being dependent upon an external file, we recommend that you consider upgrading to RSS 2.0, which does not require a DTD. While we're proud of it's history as a Netscape innovation, RSS 0.91 is deprecated, and its use should be avoided when possible.