Netscape officially became Propeller.com today, and Netscape.com became Netscape.aol.com, a sad, skinned version of AOL that will most likely result in short term ad revenue gains, but in a long term continued downward spiral of traffic for the site.
All the best to the Propeller team. I hope you can succeed despite AOL’s bad decisions.
A year ago today, Jason, myself, Alex, Brian, Alexia, Randall, Ryan, Karina, Fabienne, Elliot, Dakota, Trey, Craig, Andy, and Christoph, along with some help from the Blogsmith developers, launched the beta of the New Netscape. A lot of us are no longer there, a lot of us are, but it’s good to see the site and the Netscape community continuing to thrive and grow. The browser is amazing and everyone should check it out.
As I write this there are 411,590 stories in Netscape and 268,240 Netscape members. Not too shabby for a year. Can’t wait to see what the future holds! Go Team Netscape, go!
Navigator 9 Beta has been released - The Netscape Blog
It’s got a side browser, a temporary link pad for links that you want to check later but don’t want to keep bookmarked forever, it’s Firefox, skinned nicely, and tweaked nicely. I’ve been using it for months. It works with every Firefox plug in. It’s amazing. Get it now.
Also, if you check the credits, you’ll see my name. 
For the second year in a row, I’ve been in start-up mode for the early months of the year, and I thought now that I’m in a real start-up existing outside of a large corporate structure, it’s time to reflect a bit upon what the past two years have been like: the similarities, the differences, and why I love doing this.
When Jason and Brian sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL in October 2005, I was a lead blogger for TUAW, contributor to about 4 other Weblogs, Inc. blogs, and perhaps the most vocal (admittedly often noisily so) WIN blogger on the Weblogs, Inc. mailing list. When I first met many of the Weblogs, Inc. bloggers in NYC at AOL HQ at 75 Rock post our acquisition in November, many of them said, half in awe / half in jest, “How do you have time to blog with all the emails you send to the WIN list?” The answer is the same that I gave them when I was the first one at the 2nd day of meetings despite being the most “outgoing” at the previous night’s celebrations: I’m an energetic workaholic / playaholic maniac.
At those meetings, Jason was talking quite a bit about how several of us would be moving into full-time positions soon enough. Privately, I lamented to him that I was stuck in an odd position, as I had workaholic’ed myself into the highest position I could get within Fordham University’s Instructional Technology and Academic Computing department, as the Instructional Technologist in charge of the Faculty Resource Centers and in charge of helping the faculty use technology in the classroom. I was making more money than I would be able to make starting out as an English Professor (which was my career path) and I was locked into my salary due to my wife, our mortgage, student loans, and a litany of other real-world factors. Jason smiled, patted me on the back, and said, “Soon, brother. Patience.”
Fast forward two months to early January 2006: I walked into Fleur’s office at Fordham, and she (the Director of the Instructional Technology and Academic Computing Department at Fordham) said the same thing she had said many times before when I walked into her office: “You’re not leaving me.” Except, this time, I didn’t say “no” and she immediately said, somewhat distraught, “You *are* leaving me.” I was. Jason had offered me the position of Managing Editor for Netscape and it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass by.
What followed in the next two months, at face value, was little more than me becoming a full-time blogger for TUAW, all the while trying to staff up the blog and prepare for my departure from TUAW. In reality, I immediately began looking for the team of people who would build and maintain the new Netscape. I immediately entered into meeting upon meeting with different departments within AOL clamoring for a piece of the reinvented Netscape pie. To a large degree, this meant meeting upon meeting of me saying “No. No. No. We cannot do that. No.” Such is the life of a start-up trapped within a large corporate structure. For all the positive energy that one aggregates in producing something new and good in that structure, there is an equal expenditure of negative energy holding back the swarms of people who don’t understand the product, who only think in terms of cookie-cutter monetization, and who miss the point: if you make something cool and pure and nice AND (most importantly) useful, the Internet will reward you. If you put barriers in the way of that, you’re screwed. Also, there’s the nightmare of process in such a structure for things like expense reports that I won’t bore (and horrify you) with.
Aside: I must take a moment here to implore everyone at AOL: release the new Netscape Browser. I’ve played with early versions of it and it’s great. The best browser out there. You will reap great rewards and good faith from the Internet community if you would simply release the bugger. The people who used to be my team worked hard on that thing and they deserve to see it released. It’s Firefox, but better.
Jason, myself, and our entire team worked hard to re-launch Netscape in mid-June, 2006. We continued to work hard to make sure it was a success, and our hard work paid off.
After Miller was ousted from AOL, Jason left. I took over the position of General Manager of Netscape in November 2006, looking forward to working with Jim Bankoff to continue to grow Netscape. A week after my team met with Jim, who is a great guy, to discuss the future of Netscape in a post-Jason AOL, Jim announced that he was leaving. This was in early November, almost an exact year after the AOL acquisition of Weblogs, Inc., and here I was experiencing that same uneasy feeling that I had painted myself into a corner. My job switched from being the type of editorial and product growth position that I enjoyed to being more of an umbrella position, attempting to protect the start-up culture of Netscape from the big corporate culture of AOL, and I wasn’t enjoying myself day to day. In early January, again, almost an exact year after giving notice at Fordham, I gave notice at AOL.
That single decision was the smartest one of my life. As soon as I announced my resignation from Netscape, I began receiving inquisitions from possible future employers interested in my expertise. I had been so busy working to build a social news network for the masses that I had failed to see that I was one of the few people on the planet with the expertise of running such a site, of helping to build such a site, and of managing a dynamic group of people working remotely on such a site. I was in demand.
I consulted on a few projects and was looking forward to getting back into the freelance writing game when Jason contacted me with the idea behind what would become Mahalo. At first, I didn’t get it. I thought, “Search? Why would you throw yourself in front of a train like Google?” Jason flew me out to LA one weekend. We had dinner in Westwood and he drew an early description of a Mahalo search result page on a legal pad and walked me through the idea and suddenly it clicked. Mahalo wasn’t about trying to beat Google, but about trying to work alongside Google to provide a guide to the search experience, spam-free, to help save people time. It was something good and nice and especially useful.
Fast forward to today in early June. I started later on Mahalo than I did on Netscape and we launched Mahalo (albeit in alpha) sooner than we launched Netscape. In that time, we have done far more than we did on Netscape. We’ve hired around 40 people. We’ve hand-written over 4000 search results. We’ve built a smooth-running fast website on the back of MediaWiki. We’re already providing a spam-free search alternative to the masses and we’ve done so in record time. Most importantly, we’re just getting started. There’s been no negativity. It’s all positive. I work with an amazing group of positive people, focused on a project that is any editorially-minded and educationally-minded person’s dream job. I get to support a growing group of talented search experts in building a spam-free and advertorial-free oasis on the Internet. That doesn’t just help all the web 2.0, Internet-savvy people out there. We have the potential to help every single Internet user who has begun to feel the burden of the time they waste parsing through all the spam and noise that is growing on the Internet. We’re here to help. I’m here to help. And, I feel helpful. And that’s why I love this job.
Cool things are going on over at Netscape. Check out NewsQuake:
The Netscape team is very proud to roll out a new feature: NewsQuake. This is where our staff will blog about current events (in the real world and the virtual one), politics, culture, and some of the zanier stories unearthed by our membership. New posts will appear every single day–often more than once a day–and we encourage visitors to stop by, sample the smorgasbord, and leap into the discussion threads.
Congrats to the entire Netscape Team on launching this! When I was still with Netscape we’d been discussing finding a good place for the editorial, where it could live separately from the chaos of the pure social news and the site-related announcements on the Netscape Blog, and it looks like they finally found a place for it… and came up with a great name! Go, Netscape, go!
ps—Release the Browser already!!! It’s awesome!!!
This video starts out slow, but you must watch the entire thing:
So Shmuly from OneParkAvenueReality consistently chats to me ever since Netscape Video first launched and he tried to convince me to make him a featured vlogger on Netscape. This was back when he was on his second or third show, so I pretty much laughed him off. I have to say, though. Of all the followers who ping me all the time post Netscape, Shmuly is by far the most entertaining. A few weeks ago, he pinged me to show off his appearance in the New York Times and to tell me how he proved me wrong, because I said he’d never make it (which I never, by the way, said; I just said that he wasn’t a good fit for Netscape, which he wasn’t). Last week, he popped into chat to tell me that he had legally changed his name to C.K. Sample IIII. Pretty funny / scary.
Anyway, I have to hand it to him. The fact that he just walked into the Seattle PI offices with a camera and filmed the whole thing is amazing. Really gutsy and really funny too. I love it when he zooms in on Monica Guzzman’s ID badge and says, “I can’t believe security let me in here.”
UPDATE: Aw, crap, it was all staged. LAME.
Correction: Today is my last official day at AOL. Stupid time change had me thinking yesterday was today. Yeesh…
TodayTomorrow is officially my last day consulting with AOL, although I’ve been transitioning for a while. Netscape is in good hands with Tom and James. I hope the company continues to do everything possible to help Netscape grow.
As for me, onwards and upwards!
Update: Wow. So today is the 14th, huh?
Looks like the My.Netscape update is underway. Not everything is functional yet, so they must be mid-push, but you can head over and poke around. There’s some cool little widgets including Engadget and Digg, even. Looking nice.
Well, I’ve been twittering. I’ve been playing my new Wii. I’ve also been shopping. I went to Best Buy yesterday and picked up a $20 component switch box, so my HD Cable box, my PS3, and my Wii all reach my wall-mounted 32″ HDTV via the same hidden cable, which makes my wife happy. I bought Curt a replacement set of headphones for the set that Sonja flew over and tore to shreds when Kristin and I were in LA and he and Marian were bird-sitting. I also got Kristin an Apple Hi-Fi, which she’d been wanting for a while. It sounds pretty good, I must say.
I should have waited to buy it today at CompUSA, though, b/c everything in the store was 10-20% off since they’re closing down. Unfortunately, the web-advertized $679 for a MacBook wasn’t being upheld by this store where the people were incredibly rude. NEWSFLASH COMPUSA EMPLOYEES: Your horrible customer service is why your entire chain is going out of business and you’ll soon be unemployed. I mean, I was considering buying a *lot* of Wii games at a discount from you, which would have helped your company’s bottom line, but you couldn’t be bothered to stand at that glass case and let me look for just a little while longer. Instead, you rushed me out the door with two classic controllers and one game. Bully for you.
I was hoping to find a largish hard drive and a Wacom tablet for sale at the store, but there weren’t any of either. I need to get a good Wacom tablet to sketch some stuff digitally. I am going to get pt to laser-etch some of my artwork onto metal plates. Should be really great stuff if it comes out the way I’ve been visualizing it in my head.
Kristin made some mean BLT sandwiches for dinner. Evidently it was some recipe she got from Martha Stewart. It was super-tasty and filling.
What else is up? Hmm… I’m about settled on getting an iPhone after my BlackJack crapped out on me for the 3rd time since I first grabbed it and I had to reset it again.
Also, I’ve been wrapping up the last of my responsibilities at AOL and prepping for my full separation from the company on the 15th. I’m glad the Netscape team is going strong and I hope that AOL continues to support them and let them push the envelope. My.Netscape renovation is coming soon and is looking HOT. Also, the Netscape browser is like Firefox but BETTER. I love it. I use it all the time. It’s sleeker and nice and I cannot wait until the team releases it. Lots of cool little features. It’s really going to be the version of Firefox that gets out to the masses, I think, because of the strength of the Netscape brand. Think of all the Netscape 4.7 / 8.2 users out there who are going to download this new version to give it a whirl and be BLOWN away. I am so stoked.
I’m looking forward to moving on to the next thing though. I’ve been juggling a few consulting opportunities of late and there are some exciting things in the works.
I’m watching The Amazing Race right now. Boston Rob & Amber FTW! CBS should try to get them to appear as the first married couple to enter the Big Brother house this summer. That would make them the only reality people to run the trifecta (sp?) of reality TV competitions.
Kristin is upset b/c she bought a Coach bag this afternoon and when she got it home and started unpacking it, she realized it was a baby bag with a diaper thing in it. Now, she’s torn as to whether to keep it until we need it, risk using it now as a regular bag and having her socialite friends (? ha ha) make fun of her for it, or to return it. My money is on the latter, though I think she should just keep it and use it now and keep using it when we crank out a kid.
I think I’m caught up on blogging now. Later.
…who made it into this The Wizards of Buzz article on the Wall Street Journal. Navigators rule!
One of the problems for me when I was working at Netscape was information overload. Netscape was all about breaking news and staying on top of the breaking news, and since I was the editorial director there for so long, I woke up each morning, checked the news, checked to see if top stories were being pinned to the homepage Netscape Anchors recommend section, and then I continued checking throughout the day, whether I was on shift or not.
I feel a certain freedom from the news now that I’m not working on Netscape, and it is nice. I actually have the time to read my RSS feeds again, a habit which had once been a daily discipline, but which had fallen under the weight of all the social news information.
It’s nice to be able to take the time again to read about things that aren’t in the mainstream and to really dive into a crevice of knowledge.
Netscape just added a new feature yesterday: email a story to your friends. Awesome.
Check this out. There’s an update to Wikipedia’s Netscape entry that actually covers the new Netscape.com and I’m mentioned. No one has bothered to edit or create my page yet, but still it’s pretty cool.
Thanks to Tom for giving me the heads up.
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