The half-dozen or so users of the Netscape browser will be sad to hear that AOL is finally ending the historic browser’s run as of its latest release, which is 9.0.0.6, and was released February 20th.
With the latest version being upgraded, Netscape will alert users that they can migrate to Flock or Firefox thereafter, according to the Netscape Blog.

For the faithful, this will have been something that wasn’t shocking.  As of December 2007, Tom Drapeau announced that AOL would be ending its support of the Netscape browser, as of this particular iteration.

Its worth noting (for me, anyway), that AOL is in turn *really* pimping Flock as the alternative to Netscape, (in addition to Firefox, of course) and like a presidential nominee gracefully exiting the race and throwing his support behind *another* nominee, it will be interesting to see if Flock will get a substantial boost from Netscape’s numbers — and more importantly, if this bumper crop of new users will stay behind the socially-driven browser.

(and of course if there is a boost, it will give a real idea of how many Netscape faithful there really are, and with Flock’s retention rate, how interested they are in Flock’s social features)

About a month ago, I wrote about how Netscape dumped its social news component into its own site, Propeller.com and wondered rhetorically how it would turn out — with the subtext being, perhaps, how *Netscape* would really fare now that its social news component was on its own.

Well, a month has come and gone, and I think that if Alexa is any indication (and yes, it certainly has its problems), the answer might be “substantial”.

Now, granted, the people who use Alexa are probably the same folks who have Alexa tool bars installed on their browsers; also, the people who like the traditional 1999-style traditional site that is up on Netscape are folks who probably *don’t*.

Having said that, I think it does provide a good idea, all other things being equal, of what kind of percentage of people who *are* social news buffs out of the “old” Netscape site … who are now, of course, propeller-fans/heads/geeks.

But it certainly does give a picture that the move to break off the social news site into its own URL was probably *good* for Propeller, it certainly looks like it wasn’t a good move for Netscape — at least amongst folks who like to install Alexa toolbars.

And at least it validates Jason Calacanis — and indeed all the hard work Netscape folks have done over the past year or so to cultivate a community in Digg’s shadow — that so many of the people at Netscape were genuine fans *of* social news.

As a footnote, if, all things are equal, what’s kind of interesting is that the traffic for *both* sites are also trending downward over the past month. Now, this may be evidence of a more general “September dip” that many sites are experiencing as folks head back to school. If anyone questions this, just ask Facebook, as I do believe this is a genuine phenomenon, and not, for example, “stupid”. :)

The “Social” Netscape has finally and officially moved to its new url, Propeller.com as of today. The official blog states that we should expect some growing pains, particularly as it sorts out its problem with spam.  For example, I suspect  *any* post regarding tramadol is *probably* spam.  It also says that there are new stuff in the pipeline which should be interesting to see as a means of differentiating itself from all of the other social news sites.

If you were wondering about the new url being a bit of an island compared to its parent aol/netscape, fear not as pickings *from* Propeller will be appearing on Netscape and vice versa.  For more information follow a Propeller fan site (already?!) and of course the scouts, such as Muhammad Saleem.

Update:  Apparently official communications were such that Scouts were in fact told of the upcoming changes.

Some sad (or happy, depending on your point of view) news coming out of AOL this morning: they plan to scuttle Jason Calacanis’s social legacy by moving the “social” version of netscape (read: “you can vote on stories … like Digg”) off to a sub domain and have the original domain serving up an old fashion portal, circa 1999.

Wait — that’s not entirely fair … Yahoo.com also serves up a portal, as does MSN.com, and its 2007.

Why am I *not* skewering these URL’s (and their parent companies), but critical of Netscape?

Why am I *not* relishing in this apparent giant vote of non-confidence of AOL in this apparent, but tarnished, clone of Digg? (if paying people to moderate is tarnishing, that is). Something that many, about a year ago, clamoured *would* fail?

Only because unlike its other two towering bretheren, until quite recently — actually, until last year, when the new “social” version of Netscape debut’d — Netscape.com’s own traffic was in a tailspin. It only flattened out when it changed its focus to a “Digg clone”.

So yes, it looks like the higher ups at AOL aren’t quite happy enough with “bringing things out a fatal nosedive”, and want to stick with a strategy that a) everyone else is already doing and b) something that was in place *while* Netscape *was* in a nosedive.

Its what’s called a “safe” bet, I suppose, doing what everyone else is doing — but sadly, its a defensive measure that won’t, I predict, win any great strides amongst every day net users(no matter what their data shows), nor, of course, any “leet” early adopters.

[As a post script, I do realize that the “social” netscape will be moved to another subdomain (or its own domain), and that we’ve been “tantalized” with new features (according to the blog post). On the other hand, it seems like keeping one’s own employees is de rigeur this week. The navigators that I’ve spoken to (and there aren’t that many that I know) seemed to have been kept in the dark as to these changes. Which, perhaps, tells you how confident they are in these changes and the social netscape. Or, perhaps, that they’re merely lousy at internal communications].