AOL Drops Netscape’s Social News Features

After a little more than a year, AOL is dropping social news-ranking features from Netscape.com in favor of a more-traditional news portal.

In June of 2006, AOL announced it would be adding social news features to its Netscape portal, aiming to tap into the popularity of sites like Digg, Slashdot, and Google News in which the rankings assigned to news stories by the site’s users can determine (in part) what news items are most prominently displayed. The result is supposed to mean the most interesting and relevant items float to the top; the reality is usually that niche stories with a significant “fan” following—or organizations which can successfully “game” the sites—usually reap the benefits in terms of increased Internet traffic.

Now, Netscape has announced it will be reverting to a more-traditional news portal format wherein top stories are selected by a team of editors. According to Netscape director Tom Drapeau, “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.”

Netscape plans to launch a separate social news site “in the very near future.” An AOL spokesperson has told the Associated Press that last November’s departure of Weblogs founder Jason Calacanis is unrelated to AOL’s decision to nix social news aspects from the Netscape portal.