It’s easy enough to yell “I knew it” after something has happened. But, the news of Netscape’s social news portal is not going to be Netscape’s front page any more doesn’t exactly surprise me.

The truth is, me and other reporters have mentioned Netscape, Shoutwire and many other competitors to Digg mostly out of courtesy. The cold, harsh reality is that there’s only place for the select few on the top of the social content arena, and at this time those are Digg and Reddit. Everyone else is either stagnating, dying, slowing down, or merely lingering.

Currently, the Netscape social site is gone and it’s not really clear when and where will it reappear. I doubt that many people will be upset too much about this. The new page, primarily located at netscape.aol.com is a boring old portal affair and it will probably also get shut down in a year or two.

It’s a weird phenomenon that’s got me puzzled for quite a long time. Why is there place for everyone in, say, social networking, where hundreds of networks thrive, but it’s so damn hard to create a new Digg? I’d say that it takes a great site, an enthusiastic core community which will carry the site over through its gestation period, and a bunch of luck. I guess those three things are simply not that easy to find.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.