AOL gives up on the Netscape social news portal and turns it back into an ordinary news site.

The Netscape social society experiment is apparently over. Last summer AOL turned the portal into a digg-like site where users could submit, vote for and comment upon news articles and stories.

Search engine marketers report that Netscape do generate traffic, and there is clearly a lot of social activity going on. Still, this was probably not enough, as AOL now says that they will return to the original formula:

The present social news portal to the right.

“We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”

We guess that the real reason is that the new Netscape did not bring in enough advertising revenue.

It is unclear what is going to happen with the present social web site. Netscape says that they will put up a new site under a new domain housing the current communities, but they have not given us a name for the new site.

If you want to want to see how the “new old Netscape” will look like, you can go to netscape.aol.com. As you will see, it is more or less a clone of the Yahoo.com home page, the main exception being that AOL Netscape is powered by the Google search engine.

The new version of Netscape, left.

For those who have been around for a while, the Netscape brand will always be associated with the first great web browser around, the heir of Mosaic. Netscape lost out to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Last year’s Netscape portal’s rebirth was apparently the last attempt to give the brand a new life. AOL failed in this, and we only have to conclude that the Netscape brand is — for all practical purposes — dead.

The Netscape browser lives on. Not in the present Netscape Navigator incarnation, though. That browser has very few users, indeed. No, Netscape has survived and triumphed as the core of the very popular Firefox browser.

See also:

Netscape Digg clone is Kaput (TechCrunch)
AOL says goodbye to Netscape Social News (Search Engine Journal)