I’ll admit it I’m a regular Netscape.com user and I think their system is much more feature rich and user friendly than Digg, or should I say it used to be …
For example lets look at the “old style” profile page for the chief editor C.K. Sample
Basically it was a concise kick-ass page. You could see friends online, mutual friends, editors, stories submitted, stories voted, stories promoted videos promoted, latest comments, the whole shebang on one page. Now contrast this with the “new and improved page
Lets see I get to see stories voted and friends … and … and … well … that’s it. So they “improved” the page by now showing me less information! But wait all the information didn’t go away it’s just put on other pages. Want to see what they voted on, commented on, or submitted you’ve got to visit the more pages.
So why did Netscape go ahead and make what is an indefensible hatchet job to the User Interface? The reason is plain and simple, to jack up page views. Instead getting everything on one page, you’ve now got to visit three, four or five pages to see the same amount of data. Sound like any other really popular social sites you know … maybe like MySpace?
Don’t think all those page views are important, maybe you missed this article on Techcrunch It’s Official(ish): MySpace Is Biggest Site on Internet
The November Comscore numbers show the inevitable: Fox Interactive (mostly MySpace) now has more page views than the combined Yahoo sites, taking the no. 1 spot for the first time. This was less to do with MySpace growth than with a 9% dip in overall Yahoo traffic (total Internet traffic for all sites in November dipped just 3%; Google was up 5%).
So why does Netscape need to jack up page views? Take a look at the article Valleywag wrote up when Jason left Netscape EXCLUSIVE: Netscape: the Calacanis effect – Valleywag
Valleywag has obtained the internal traffic stats for Netscape.com, the unit which AOL gave Calacanis to run. The numbers are brutal: in the middle of June, before Calacanis overhauled Netscape’s front page, the property commanded over 130m pageviews per week. Within two months, traffic had declined nearly 70%.
To be fair deeper in the article it comes out that Netscape made a business decision to move mail to the AOL domain which resulted in a drop in page views, however it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the sooner that traffic curve hits bottom and starts moving up the better. However sacrificing usability to show an artificial increase in page views isn’t the answer. C’mon Netscape let’s get real the new profile update sucks, it’s slow, clunky, cumbersome and unwieldy. It doesn’t make things easier for your users in any way, in fact it’s gotten horribly worse. Stand up and admit this was a mistake and roll it back
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And while you’re at it Netscape – roll back the ’spam’ filter a bit too…
I’m not at Netscape anymore as you know, but i don’t think that was the reason they made a new page.
The main reason they did this is so that you can see the full story summary (as opposed to the tiny one). Now you can vote for stories on a personal profile page–on the old one you could not. Now you can visit the site link on the profile page (last time it took two clicks).
So, in fact, this one probably drives page views down because folks don’t have to click through to the stories to vote!
Regardless, I think they should leave the old profile page up… call it the poweruser view or something.
calling it the Poweruser view is perfect imho.
I liked the fact that I could see latest info in multiple categories all on one page as well as friends and mutual friends that I mihgt be interested in linking to.
This is supposed to be a “social” website, right?
I agree that Netscape is far superior than digg when you consider the features. Although Digg may have more users and getting a front page listing can raise your link popularity, the community isn’t as friendly and often times controversy is what makes the front page, I find that Netscape has a more friendly social appeal, and valuable stories are easier to find.
The old interface was definitely more useful. Why do I keep getting stopped pages when I add a smily to my comments?
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