So yeah, the thing I haven't been able to talk about the last 3 or 4 months? The reason I've lost touch with friends and family? I'm the lead developer of the new
Netscape.com.
Yesterday, as you probably read about in the
New York Times,
Techcrunch,
Digg,
Slashdot, or other major media outlet, we launched the newest generation of the Netscape brand. It's a social news site blending together professional journalism and user submitted content. It's a beta and certainly not without its flaws, but we think it's a hell of an initial "release."
On the Experience...It's been a hell of a ride. Again, we wrote this thing in 3 or 4 months from scratch. We kept nothing of the existing netscape.com code base. We modeled the framework after the Blogsmith framework (which I worked on with
Gavin Hall, the dev lead on Blogsmith and Weblogs, Inc., and also my long standing business
partner), so we kinda had a decent idea of scalability and performance. (
Blogsmith runs
Engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc, and most recently,
TMZ.)
The Netscape tech team is absolutely top notch.
Brian Alvey is our chief architect and a super hero. Trey, Tom, Craig, Andy, and
MIke Propst are just amazing at what they do. Combine that with the incrediable journalists we have as anchors and the fact that
Calacanis can sell a feather to a pimp -- it's bound to be entertaining. The experience was (is) even more enjoyable simply because we all get along so well. We're kind of like a
techie street gang.
On Launch...
Seriously.. Who showed Jason how to use iChat?! Now I have a giant, upset Jason staring at me when things aren't working right. Talk about pressure. ;) It's all good though, while some prefer email and IM, I guess I'm just a little more traditional with the face-to-face. Having the video going made it really easy to communicate with the folks up at 75 rock. God bless the internet.
It wasn't a perfect launch, we had amazing amounts of traffic and media coming in right from the very first minute, but we've learned a lot and it'll make us a better site going forward. Beta is about exposing weaknesses and fixing them, and I think we accomplished that (and will continue to do so).
Mad props go out to the hosting staff at AOL -- Matt Dunbar, who has stayed up with us on the damn-near-all-nighters, Adam Leff who we paged out of bed last night, Joe Gibbs, Kevin Pettit, Jacob and everyone else who puts up with our annoying help-us phone calls -- the list could take up an entire blog post. Much love.
On Digg...
I'll just take it head on -- of course we modeled ourselves after digg. It's an iteration, and a huge compliment to Digg itself. We're validating social news on a much more mainstream level. Are we a "digg killer," uh, no. Was digg a slashdot killer? I still check both. It's not a zero sum kinda thing. I pay for slashdot, and I would gladly pay for digg. I don't need to pay for Netscape, cause well, we have enough ad's to cover it........ (
ahem) yeeaaah...
Digg wasn't the first site in the social news space by a long shot. Hell, I wrote a half assed
attempt at it six years ago. My version failed, just like most of the others before Digg. Digg succeeded because
Kevin Rose and his team did a
hell of a job.
I know there's a lot of uproar from the Digg army about how close our site looks to Digg. Take out the vote badge, and would that still be the case? What then? We use the color yellow? This is web2.0 -- we all use the color yellow. We settled on the badge after playing around with a handful of other metaphors. Props to
newsvine by the way, I love that damn vote thing. The fact is, Digg got it right. Why would we not do something that we thought was the best of the bunch? We could invent something else I'm sure, but seriously -- 3 months. That was our schedule. There's bigger fish to fry.
On Anchors...
Seriously. How cool is the idea of taking professional journalists, and throwing them into the mix of a social driven site? Users suggest the news, vote on the news, and the news gets covered by the people and by the folks who are paid to research things. If you can't see the power in that, then well, your just a hater ;)
C.K. and the gang are going to be the jam.
Speaking of Hate...Thanks for the QA
Valleywag. Also, lots of people freaking out about the frame navigator -- it's going to be a preference that users can turn off forever and ever, we promise. The best possible way to measure response to it is to throw it out there. Lots of people like it (if your in firefox, use j to move forward, k to move backwards, v to vote, etc... its neat), lots of people don't. Sounds like the perfect thing to make a preference out of.
As far as the ads go.. Our hands are kinda tied. We promise to clearly mark anything thats an ad as an ad. We promise to get rid of the really horrible ones as soon as we can. Hopefully, we'll be able to come up with ad placement that makes everyone happy. We've been in beta for exactly 24 hours now.
On Features...
I'm just now allowed to blog about this thing, god knows I'm probably not supposed to blab away about upcoming features. I can tell you though, we have some really neat things coming down the pipe that will help seperate netscape from the "digg clone" category. Again, or goal isn't to be another digg. It's to be a social news site. That's it. Look for really neat tie in's to the anchor stuff. Also, I'm a huge fan of tagging and the like, so, hopefully we'll be able to get us-some-of-that (more than we have). And obviously, RSS/JSS on damn near everything. Oh, and whatever Digg v3.0 does, cause, all the haters bring in lots of traffic..... ;)
On Feedback...
We're listening. Leave a comment on someones blog, or use the feedback link on the new netscape site itself (sign in, its in your user info box, top right).
On Blah...
I'm officially pooped. Looking forward to decent sleep tonight and maybe a full meal in the morning. My appetite is finally starting to come back now that the caffiene is fading off.. w00t.
Blogsmith CodeJam (number 7, btw) rolls on. The hotel we're at is great, much much more functional than our previous trips. 
CodeJam Orlando: "About damn time."
It's been known internally for awhile now, but it's time for me to transition off of the Netscape.com project and back to Blogsmith. As some of you know, Blogsmith was the project that I worked on prior to Netscape and is something that I thoroughly enjoy. It's the CMS that powers Weblogs, Inc., TMZ, and a host of other major sites in and out of AOL. 
Last night I went out with 
Rocks!
