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http://www.sina.com.cn June 16, 2006, 00:18 Sina Technology
The figure shows the new version of the Netscape homepage that is in public beta testing (Image source: Sina Technology)
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By Lei Jin
Sina Technology News - On June 15th, AOL is planning a complete overhaul for Netscape. The newly designed homepage has already started its public beta test at (www.beta.netscape.com/). It's known that the new homepage borrows from the concept of the emerging IT community Digg, adopting a method where users recommend articles. Industry insiders have directly called it the "Digg Killer."
"Almost a clone of Digg," numerous netizens commented after trying it out. Similar to Digg, it allows netizens to vote on articles, and the more votes an article receives, the more prominent its position becomes on the homepage or category page. This is precisely the characteristic of Digg that many netizens appreciate.
However, some netizens also noticed that there are still instances of manual intervention on the category pages or homepage, which essentially involves editors manually rating the articles.
To date, AOL's "Digg Killer" has set up 30 thematic categories with eight full-time and eleven part-time editors. In addition to adjusting important news, they will also host a real-time 7x24 hour online chat room where users can discuss topics of interest.
Additionally, it is worth noting that the new Netscape homepage currently in beta testing has other interesting features. For example, users can easily tag submitted articles for future searches, and each category page, group, and user will have their own independent RSS feed.
In fact, using the Netscape brand to launch such a new service instead of starting from scratch indicates how much AOL values this service. According to data released by AOL, Netscape has a monthly page view count of 8.1 billion, far exceeding that of Digg.
Industry insiders believe that if such a large audience can be directed to a service similar to Digg, the resulting impact would be quite significant.