Eli Goldberg emails us. He writes:
“If you’re ever having a slow news day, you might be able to do something funny with this.
It’s the instructions I received in summer 1996 when starting at Apple explaining how to employees how use a Netscape web browser to obtain our benefits information, including how to use a web browser’s back button.”
Dear Eli, there’s no such thing as a slow news day. And there’s no chance we’re not posting what you sent us. Below, find Apple’s instructions on how to use Netscape Navigator, the Web browser and flagship product of Netscape Communications Corporation. → Read More
Horace Dediu notes that Nokia and RIM are on a precipitous decline and that it is now, in short, a two horse race: Apple v. Android. The age of the smartphone – an era where anyone with a keyboard and some apps could make it in the world marketplace – is over.
I’d call this, now, the Age of Fragmentation – new devices are overlapping each other from both sides of the fence as users wait for new iPhones and swear that the next HTC, Samsung, or Motorola Android phone will be better than an undifferentiated predecessor. As a result, sales are fairly solid for each of those manufacturers but not amazing and the manufacturers who aren’t part of the game are losing market share.
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(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go here and here.)
On May 26, 2009 Mike sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company at about $10 billion. The camera-work is Blair-Witch-Project-like at best. You can barely hear the audio, and Zuckerberg can’t for the life of him figure out whether to look at the camera or Mike. It doesn’t really matter because, just after he asks, Mike proceeds to cut off half his face anyway.
But shoddy production aside, this may have been one of the most pivotal moments TechCrunch has ever captured on camera.
We didn’t know it at the time, but this was something more than an unexpected investment by an unheard of investor in a seemingly overhyped social network. It was a moment we’d been waiting for for more than a decade. Something we’d been obsessing about. It was the moment when a Web startup fundamentally broke all the normal rules of gravity that govern all Web startups. It was the moment that would eventually spawn a new, unchartered frenzy of late stage dealmaking. In my opinion, it was nothing short of the Web 2.0 generation’s answer to “the Netscape moment.” → Read More
A lot of things about Facebook have been impressive, even by the Silicon Valley standards. Almost no other Valley company has reached so many people around the world so quickly. Few Valley companies have been considered important forces in causes as disparate as planning a party or a political uprising. Rarely has a kid in his early 20s held onto the CEO reins this long. And of course, no other Valley company has been made into a star-studded, over the top Oscar-nominated film.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Facebook mafia– made up of high profile alumni responsible for building companies like Quora, Cloudera, Jumo, Asana and Path– has also emerged so early and become so distinct, well before Facebook has come close to a major liquidity event. Like most of the things that make Facebook unique, part of this is due to Facebook itself, and part is due to the time in which the company was formed. → Read More
[photopress:netscape_1.jpg,full,center] It’s a sad day for the Internet, as today marks the final day of Netscape Navigator, the first mass market graphical Webrowser and the precursor to our favorite, Firefox. As of tomorrow, AOL, who owns Netscape, will cease support of the browser entirely tomorrow. At one time, Netscape was the de facto Internet browser, but due to some nefariousness on the part of Microsoft, Internet Explorer took over. Now, the spiritual successor to Netscape, Firefox, is chipping away at IE’s market dominance. Still, it’s sad to see an old friend leave forever. So take a moment today to thank Netscape, for without it, the Internet would likely be a much different place than it is today. Final goodbye for early web icon [BBC] → Read More
Now that I have your attention, Compete has released a list of the fastest-growing (and fastest-declining) sites of 2007. Some of the fastest growers include Veoh, LinkedIn, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Six Apart, and WordPress. Some of the notable sinkers are Bolt, Xanga, Netscape, and Autobytel. TechCrunch has the distinct honor of taking the No. 5 spot in the fastest-growing list, right behind YouPorn and in front of DateHookup. I am not exactly sure what to make of that. I guess Compete thinks we’re hot. CrunchBase Information YouPorn Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
When Netscape announced they were shuttering their iconic Internet browser last month, they recommended to users that they consider moving over to Firefox: “We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try. We know you’ll enjoy it!” (they also gave instructions for migrating from Netscape to Firefox). That makes sense, since Mozilla spun out of Netscape originally. Today, however, they split their endorsement. In a blog post titled “Netscape Recommends Flock, Too,” Netscape’s Richard Klein describes Flock as “Firefox with social integration” and gives it his thumbs up. The only problem is that Netscape has next to no actual users left to make these recommendations to – less than 1% market share. Flock must love the endorsement, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on actual downloads. We’re fans of Flock here, too (Duncan gushes, whereas I think its excellent but very slow sometimes). Personally, I’m finding Firefox 3 for the Mac the best, fastest and most stable browser I’ve ever used. CrunchBase Information Flock Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Please observe a moment of silence for the Netscape browser. Netscape Navigator, the browser that launched the commercial Internet in October 1994, will die on February 1, 2008. AOL, which acquired Netscape in November 1998 for $4.2 billion, will announce today that they will discontinue development of the browser, currently on version 9. In an email exchange yesterday with Tom Drapeau, Director of AOL/Netscape development, he said that only a handful of AOL engineers are still tasked with keeping the browser updated. Most of their efforts have been aimed at creating a Netscape-skinned version of Firefox with the Netscape look and feel. The team has been unable to gain any significant market share against Microsoft Internet Explorer. In fact, recent surveys suggest that Netscape currently has only 0.6% market share among browsers, compared to IE’s 77.35% and Firefox’s 16.01%. This, of course, is the same browser that once claimed more than 90 percent of the market, sparking the browser wars of the 1990s and the subsequent Microsoft antitrust trial. Drapeau says AOL’s transition into an ad-supported web business leaves little room for any real effort at maintaining and evolving the Netscape Browser. He also points to the success of the non-profit Mozilla foundation, which spun off of Netscape in February 1998 with $2 million in funding from Netscape and an additional $300,000 from Mitch Kapor. Firefox, which is part of Mozilla, brought in nearly $70 million in 2006 revenues, mostly from a search deal with Google. In a sense, Netscape lives on through the open-source efforts of Mozilla and Firefox. Support for existing versions of Netscape Navigator will cease on February 1, 2008. After that, users can visit the UFAQ and the Netscape Community Forum for support. AOL is also setting up a Netscape Archive where users will be able to download old versions of Netscape, without any support. I sadly place the first browser I ever used into the TechCrunch DeadPool. → Read More
Social voting remained a popular past time in 2007 with sites such as Digg more than tripling their audience, but some sites fared better than others according to data from comScore. One name with a long history is the AOL owned Netscape.com. The site was relaunched in June 2006 as a Digg clone with high hopes that a new generation would use the once great brand as an alternative to Digg. The strategy failed dismally, but the termination in the end was even worse. From November 2006 through to August 2007 (the last full month as a Digg clone) Netscape’s traffic dropped from 305 million pages views a month to 137 million, a 55.1% drop in 9 months. AOL dumped social voting on Netscape September 19, and things went from bad to worse, with traffic dropping in August from 137 million page views to a dismal 38 million in November, down 72.3%. The new home for the Netscape social voting experiment Propeller performed reasonably, but failed to capture most of Netscape’s previous social voting audience. With 13 million pages views (according to comScore) in November 07, Propeller has managed to pick up less than 10% of Netscape’s August audience. The big winner once again in the social voting space was Digg. Starting at 11 million page views in November 2006, Digg saw a 318% increase in traffic to 46 million 12 months later. Reddit fared well increasing from 2 million page views in February 2007 (the first month it was big enough to be recorded by comScore) to 9 million in November, although October was a highpoint with 16 million page views. → Read More
Traffic on AOL’s Netscape portal has plummeted since the site dumped its social news voting model and reverted to a new portal, at least according to Alexa. Unfortunately the comScore figures for Netscape aren’t yet available for September so we can’t confirm the traffic crash, but despite Alexa’s argued issues the crash in traffic as shown by Alexa is unlikely to be an Alexa only quirk. Tony Hung, who first picked up on the traffic crash notes that “[the traffic crash] validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.” He’s right. If Alexa is to be believed, Netscape’s traffic is now at its lowest level ever and ranks at a miserly 2,200th, a far cry from the days where Netscape was in the top 10 destinations online or even in the Top 600 during its time as a Digg clone. Some one at AOL may have some explaining to do given that the decision destroyed the traffic (and value) of Netscape by over 50%. → Read More
AOL has announced that Propeller.com will be the new home for the Netscape social media experiment. What was once considered a possible Digg-killer is now relegated to the backwaters of AOL. In a statement, Tom Drapeau said that AOL was “working hard behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition before we officially launch at this new destination,” which given the site isn’t live yet is code for we eventually found a spare domain to rid ourselves of our Digg clone. It might be too early to Deadpool the Netscape Social news experiment yet, but without the type-in traffic and brand recognition of the Netscape name, the whole idea will struggle to survive; after all the Netscape name, and previously Jason Calacanis’ evangelism was really all the site had going for it. I’ve heard some unconfirmed reports that since the initial announcement the site has been bleeding staff and contributors as well; I give it 12 months max, or AOL flogging Propeller off during this time for a fairly low sum. → Read More
We’ve known about it for weeks (despite Netscape’s claims that our post was innacurate), but now it’s confirmed: AOL has announced the end of Netscape as a social news portal. In a statement, Tom Drapeau spun the decision as being AOL listening to its customers and as part of their “desire to better serve our community.” On the decision itself, Drapeau stated: 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 new (old) Netscape home page is not live quite yet, but can be viewed at netscape.aol.com. All traffic to Netscape.com will shortly be redirected to this site. Drapeau claims that the social news service will go on at a new site, but failed to name the site or when it would be launched; certainly not a good sign for the current Netscape editorial team. → Read More
We’ve gotten an update on the controversial post we wrote earlier this month on the possible shutdown of the fourteen-month-old old Digg-clone Netscape. Too many AOL execs have had their eye on the Netscape.com domain name, which brings in 3 million or so page views per day. The most likely scenario – The current home page at aol.netscape.com becomes the default page for Netscape.com, and the year old digg-clone moves to a new domain. We hear that wow.com, a domain previously owned by Compuserve and acquired by AOL, is a potential landing place for the Netscape service. AOL may have different plans for wow.com, however, and the Netscape portal may land somewhere else. Either way, look for a link or module from the old service to remain on the netscape.com domain after the changeover. We also expect to hear about material layoffs at AOL in the next six weeks, possibly as much as 15% of the 16,000 strong workforce. Next week the senior execs are supposed to be notified of the exact size of the cuts and whether they are targeted to specific business groups or across the board cuts. → Read More
AOL is considering killing off the “Digg Clone” social news site that they launched a little over a year ago at Netscape.com, and redirecting traffic to the Netscape portal instead. One source says it’s a done deal. Another says no final decisions have been made. But the Netscape editorial team is rumored to be completely freaked out, and they are starting to talk to outsiders. Either way, take a good look at that screen shot to the right. It may be the last chance you have to see the service. It’s unclear as to why the site might be scrapped or changed. Netscape.com and netscape.aol.com are controlled by different groups with AOL. At the very least a turf war of some kind is playing a part. And since Netscape’s primary champion, Jason Calacanis, left the company late last year to start a new company, it may leave the social news property without enough clout to protect itself. See this announcement on Netscape.com that some of the traditional portal/news features are being incorporated into the site. One source says this is a testing of the waters to gather data for a final decision: Just launched this week, there is a new AOL.com site available for the Netscape Community. Over the past year, there has been a lot of feedback regarding some of the features of the previous Netscape.com site that have gone away, and this site hopes to being some of that functionality back. Check it out! Update: An AOL spokesperson carefully comments below. Community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception and will continue to be. As the text on the site explains, we wanted to give a more traditional portal alternative to the Netscape users who requested it. You can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do. The message doesn’t address the issue head on. In fact it is sort of content-free. Saying “community has been a core element of both AOL and Netscape since their inception” followed by “you can rest assured that social news will continue to be an important part of what we do.” This is very different from saying that they are not closing netscape.com as we know it. Clarification is requested. See this comment as well from Tom Drapeau, who runs the current Netscape site. He’s also clearly annoyed → Read More
Incredibly awesome magazine PC World has come out with a Top 50 Best Tech Products of All Time list and boy is it full of nostalgia. Classics include 3dfx Voodoo3 at #16, the Motorola StarTAC at #8, Tetris at #10, and Napster at #4. The most recent item on the list is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft at #27, followed by the Canon EOS Digital Rebel at #44. So who took the #1 spot? Was it Mac OS X? Perhaps the Nintendo Game Boy? Far from both, it’s actually Netscape Navigator. Yeah, that’s right. The 1994-browser you used back in school to visit LexisNexis reigns king over all gadgets and software. True, Netscape was the first mainstream browser to do it all, but the #1 spot on the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time? Psh. Way to blow it PC World. 50 Best Tech Products Of All Time [PC World] → Read More
Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers. Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule. The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg, which lets users “build their own Digg”. But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg – sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service. *Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user BlinkList BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link. ClipMarks Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole. CoRank CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page. Netscape Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team → Read More
MyNetscape (which is down as of 3 am PST) officially relaunches today as a customizable Ajax homepage for it’s users. The Netscape blog has details. Like Netvibes, Pageflakes, GoogleIG, MyYahoo, Live.com and many, many others (who am I missing?), users will have the ability to choose from “just under 100 modules” of customized content, and add RSS modules for favorite feeds. Netscape’s user base is not exactly cutting edge, and AOL is clearly taking good ideas from new startups and seeing if their users will consume them. Netscape became a Digg clone in mid-2006, and now my.netscape is to jump on the Ajax homepage bandwagon. It’s nothing to criticize them for, but it’s nothing to get excited about, either. The long, slow decline of this once great company continues. See ReadWriteWeb for more, which asks “Can Netscape’s user base handle yet another web 2.0 overhaul?” → Read More
Netscape, the five month-old Digg-clone experiment, is testing out two alternate home page designs with users in an attempt to increase the popularity of little-used topical categories. I spoke with Jason Calacanis, who runs the Netscape property, earlier this evening about the tests (Jason wrote about the upcoming changes here). He said that Netscape is seeing heavy usage in the technology and politics categories, but the remaining 31 channels, ranging from Books to Women, are seeing less user news submissions and participation. Since the Netscape home page reflects the most popular stories from all categories at any given time, it is currently very heavily weighted towards tech and politics stories. This focus creates a self propogating system that continues to promote what is already popular. The new layouts, described in a Netscape blog post, will instead show top stories from a variety of topical channels. The hope is that, once more varied stories hit the Netscape home page, these channels will become more popular. The most interesting part of the story, however, are the comments users have left to the blog post linked above. When the author wrote “What do you think?” at the end of the post, users took it as an open door to say what they felt about Netscape in general. There seems to be a lot of frustration to vent, with commenters stating things like “It’s getting to the point where I’m just about ready to close my Netscape acct. altogether,” “I hate the new Netscape!,” and “The new Netscape is a big disappointment.” Of the 15 comments posted as of the time I am writing this, only four seem to be on the topic requested by the post author, none were strongly pro-Netscape and 9 were basically asking for the old Netscape portal back. Welcome to the world of user generated content, Netscape users. → Read More
Jason Calacanis says in an AOL memo he’s posted that his model for Netscape has been vindicated by the recent conflagration at Digg and rapid growth of page views at Netscape. He says recent events are proving that top contributors to social media sites need recognition and approval, if not payment, in order to continue doing the hard work required to make a social site vibrant. Mike Arrington has called Calacanis’s move to hire top users away from other sites by offering to pay them a huge red flag for Netscape, but I disagree with Mike and think current developments in spaces like social news but especially video sharing indicate that rewarding top users may be a solid strategy. (Update: See comments below where Mike says I’ve inaccurately described his position and he clarifies.) I don’t think it’s as clear yet as Calacanis does, but I can’t think of a more interesting question to look at. As social news works itself out, advertisers seek to get into places like MySpace and YouTube and the line between amateur and pro continues to blur – there’s a number of things unfolding that could change media in the same way as bloggers at the Democratic National Convention went down in history as a key turning point for that medium. When Yahoo! bought Flickr they said that one of the system’s biggest appeals was that users built the community for free. According to Calacanis’s logic, that’s not be the direction things are moving in these days. There’s a lot of evidence to support that opinion; these sites are being made viable by the work of rewarded top users combined with high quality, very unorthodox corporate advertising. To put the recent debates about Digg (our coverage) and Netscape (our coverage) in context, here’s an overview of some of the key events unfolding right now that are blurring the line between amateur users and professional content producers. Here’s some bullet points for this meme: some top Digg users feel unappreciated Netscape’s hiring top contributors is helping grow page views fast according to Calacanis a top YouTube user turns out to be a professionally produced work YouTube users are going pro and pros are succeeding in YouTube MySpace isn’t a training ground anymore – it’s a sales platform the Revver video community has stars of its own and they’re getting paid people hate Paris Hilton. Details below. → Read More
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