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.