Our new Netscape
I’m pooped. It’s been a marathon run the past several weeks leading up to the beta launch of our new Netscape, and I am relieved and overjoyed that I can now tell all my friends, family, and any person I damn well please that the top secret project I’ve been working on is Netscape. I no longer will be forced to have this conversation:
Random other person: “I heard you left Fordham. What’s this new job?”
Me: “I work for AOL and Weblogs, Inc.”
Other person: “What do you do?”
Me: “Top secret stuff.”
Other person: *looks at me oddly*
Now, people can walk up to me and say, “I hear you left Fordham. What are you doing now?” And I can say, “I’m Managing Editor and Lead Anchor of Netscape.com.” Then, if the person is tech savvy, he/she will say, “Oh, coool!” and if s/he is not tech savvy, s/he will say, “What?” or “Like the web browser?” and then I have to explain things.
Tomorrow will be my first “day off” since before launch (though I’ll still be online, lurking, watching the site). We flew the entire anchor team into New York last week for launch and the last of them left yesterday afternoon. We were all crammed in the same room, the war room, in AOL headquarters in 75 Rockefeller, 24 hours a day for a good 7 days. You may have seen some of the pictures in the NYT story or in my Flickr stream. It was fun, exciting, but draining too.
We have a great team of people excited about Netscape. Randall Bennett, Ryan Budke, Dakota Smith, Alexia Prichard, Fabienne Serriere, Eliot Phillips, and Karina Longworth have been kicking it with the coverage on the site; expect more cool things to come from us in the near future.
All our efforts, however, would never see the light of day if it weren’t for our wonderful developer team. Brian Alvey, Netscape’s chief architect, rules. He’s smart, funny, and a great guy who has assembled a rock solid team. Alex Rudloff, lead developer on Netscape, has been my near constant chat companion over the past week and was often squatting virtually in 75 Rock with us. Andy Fraley is a design ninja. Me: “Andy, I need this.” Andy: “Okay.” 5 minutes later and BOOM. Tom Drapeau has been rocking our admin tools along with Trey Long who has been rocking a bunch of number bits I do not understand. Craig Wood, the newest edition to the team, hit the ground running and has been helping all over the place. Christoph Khouri is a strange and mysterious man with insane skills.
Mad props to Jason C for working with the people at AOL to revamp one of the internet’s great names and running a marathon group of demos pimping the project with the press.
I’m honored to be working with all these great people and fortunate to have been placed in a position where I can help support them and facilitate their endeavors.
Most importantly, thanks to all the readers who are coming to the site, using the site, liking the site, and giving us great feedback to make this thing better.
It’s our new Netscape, and it is good.
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June 28th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Craig Wood, the newest edition to the team