Netscape's Digg Clone - Good, But Needs More Ads

Credit:

Netscape's Digg clone just went live at beta.netscape.com - but fire up Adblock first, 'cos you're gonna need it! Looking beyond the ads, it's not a bad play at all - it's nicely designed and fairly intuitive. In addition to the standard Digg setup, Netscape have added an editorial section at the top of each section, pushing the user-voted content down the page.

They've also implemented an interesting (although potentially unpopular) linking scheme - headlines link to the internal Netscape pages, and the "Visit this site" link opens the page in a frame. Mainstream users won't feel a thing, but tech savvy users might wonder if this is an attempt to keep members on the site and clicking the ads. (Update: Richard MacManus argues a similar point).

The project was overseen by Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis, who's doing a great job of shaking things up at AOL/Netscape. The plan is to move the site over to the highly-trafficked Netscape.com domain (811 million pageviews per month) once the beta test is over. Unsurprisingly, Digg users are predicting failure for Netscape, while others have pointed out that Netscape's massive traffic could create something far more powerful than Digg. Personally, I'm in the latter camp - I think it could do nicely. But let's not forget that the brand new Digg is headed for imminent launch: it's going to be a great battle.

[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]