Why Netscape’s BETA copy of digg won’t beat Digg

I was shocked to see how Netscape just copied Digg so close to its layout, shamelessly.

Not only it’s stealing its concept but it doesn’t even improve anything!

Let me explain.

It aint Hype. Digg is hype, Digg is fresh. Not so long ago Netscape was giving me nightmare for blowing up my website. Hackscape, fartscape or blowscape was really not fun to deal with. They failed as web browser already, now they want to be a news central.

It’s messy. There is stuff all over the place. It looks like it’s been designed and then they added stuff on top of it “so that we give better value than Digg”… Then branded… And then add the ads on top of it.

The netscape navigator is back! First I went ‘wt..’ when I saw it. When you visit a linked site from an article, they nicely frame their “navigator”, a big black box around what you’re after. It’s hilarous, considering they failed as a web browser in the past, “netscape navigator” is back within my firefox, as a big black ugly 1/4 screen panel.

A little bug while we’re at it, when I click “next 5 >” in that black bar (for the next 5 related post I assume), it appears that their appropriated content out of their frame gets refreshed too.

You get my point. The new features are obstrusive and don’t help. The idea of related stories is nice only within the post and better positioned.

Clearly they tried to create a user-centric product similar to digg but not in the purpose of serving people by people, but serving netscape by people. I find many little quircks to Digg that I should expose in a different post, so why not redraw the board, give it a different spin, rather than copy almost every features of Digg, add 3 or 4 badly inspired concepts, wrap the thing together and call it beta.

I’m sure they can expect lots of posts similar to this one.

Here is one: Netscape: another failure?

I’m sorry I just couldn’t find a positive note to such rip-off.