What Does The Future Hold For Netscape.com?

You may remember Paul Glazowski's Netscape article last month, which mentioned that AOL was considering axing the social news service for a more traditional portal.

Now, there are more details available about the current Netscape.com, the coming features, and what could happen down the road.

Yesterday, TechCrunch revealed that Netscape will probably become more like the portal, while the current social news site could move to a new domain.

Netscape has been criticized for being a "Digg-clone," but I do not think of it as such. Digg has it's audience, which is primarily technology-oriented, while Netscape has a much broader focus. I found myself using Netscape to share more links than Digg, simply because there is a wider variety of categories to choose from. Sure the public ranking idea is the same, but each service caters to different audiences.

According to Michael Arrington, "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 scenario that he calls "most likely" involves moving Netscape.aol.com to become the default Netscape home page.

Wow.com, which was acquired by AOL from Compuserve, is apparently a possible future home page for the Netscape service, but the news is not certain. It is expected that the portal and social service will be linked to each other via modules, though.

With 3 million page views per month Jason Calacanis must have done something right when developing Netscape, which must be (at least part of) the reason why it will be moved instead of scrapped.

Now that Mr. Calacanis has moved onto Mahalo, there is really no one left to stand up for Netscape in the midst of criticism, which ultimately means that its future is in the hands of the AOL executives, who also seem to be planning labor cuts.

What do you think? Does the social news aspect deserve a new site? Or, should it be scrapped for being useless?