AOL rethinks Netscape news site yet again

AOL has announced that it will be shifting Netscape.com from a social news site to a standard news portal. You know, the kind of news portal that lived at the site before AOL decided to turn it into a page filled with user-submitted news stories and links.

Apparently AOL research shows that people do want a social news site, but people also associated the Netscape brand with traditional news. AOL is this blog's parent company, but we have not seen any research on this matter, so we're left to make wild speculation.

And we have to say, we're not sure we see the logic. For more than a year, Netscape has a been a social news site. Are you telling us that people who had visited Netscape more than a year ago still continue to type "www.netscape.com" into their web browsers due to some sort of muscle memory, expecting to find an old fashioned news portal? And really, as far as we can tell, people associate the name Netscape more with a web browser they didn't know still exists (it does, seriously), than with news.

Anyway, AOL recently launched a new Netscape landing page, which will eventually be what you see when you visit Netscape.com. And yes, we know it looks a lot like the Yahoo! home page. The social news site will survive, but AOL hasn't yet determined where it will move to.

Tags: netscape, news, news portal, NewsPortal, social news, SocialNews