Entries tagged “netscape”

Picture Terry Semel holding a little lion cub up in the air with both arms extended. What's that? It's the Circle of Life! Well, maybe Circle of Life 2.0? Okay, enough Lion King -- maybe it's just Justin Timberlake again: "What Goes Around... Comes Around".

The story I'm referring to is how each half-decade's web love story begets its successor for the attention and adoration of the press, the stock market, and the public at large.

In the beginning, there was Netscape, and it was good. But the old-timers among you will recall that Netscape began as Mosaic Communications Corporation, based on the old Mosaic browser. When that name became unusable, the codename for the browser being built was naturally named after the terrible lizard that would cause Mosaic's demise: Mozilla.

Among the many kind things the Netscape kids did (giving us a free email client, open-sourcing the code once they sold out to AOL, indirectly funding a nightclub in San Francisco), they decided to feature amongst their default links an up-and-coming web directory called Yahoo! The prominence of the nascent Yahoo site on the young Netscape browser's toolbar in an era when there were so few comprehensive guides to the web helped cement the company's position in the vanguard of web companies.

Fast forward a few years, and among the many kind things the Yahoo kids did (giving us free email, hooking Flickr up to Target once they bought the photo-sharing site, enticing Scientologists to visit), they decided to feature as their default search technology an up-and-coming web search technology company called Google. The prominence of the nascent Google engine atop the maturing Yahoo site's directory in an era when search had been largely abandoned helped cement the company's position in the vanguard of web companies.

Fast forward a few years, and among the many kind things the Google kids did (giving us free email, trying to give us free WiFi in San Francisco, building the memex), they decided to feature as their preferred browser technology an up-and-coming web browser technology called Mozilla Firefox. The prominence of the nascent Firefox download amongst Google's software offerings in an era when browser development had been largely abandoned helped cement the browser's position in the vanguard of web technologies.

This concludes today's history lesson. We have provided, above, an educational infographic offering a detailed look at the flow of linky-love between these Internet behemoths.

Related reading:

• Upon the Demise of Netscape: The Google Browser
• Wired's article on how Yahoo screwed the pooch on Google
• Some love for Mitchell Baker for being so open about Mozilla's business
• The Lion King on DVD

Some tenets:

• Contributing to a community, online or offline has value.
• As long as that value is recognized and rewarded, a community will thrive.
• Rewards can take the form of money, recognition, or just personal satisfaction.

The premises having been stated, let's review some of the latest blogosphere fuss. The current wave of conversation around recognizing the value of community contributions began with Jason Calacanis offering to pay the top contributors of link aggregation sites to migrate to the new Netscape site he's managing. Like many things Jason does, it's clever, a smart recognition of a new market and opportunity, and not particularly elegant.

To me, it was initially most notable because of the reuse of the phrase "Netscape Navigator" to describe the users who make the most contributions to the site. A friend referred to it as "brand necrophilia" on a private blog, and I find that a particularly apt description. But of course, the post got a lot of attention for being a fairly brash attempt to grab both users and attention.

Jason also offered the following false assertion, I suspect not because he believed it, but because it's effective propaganda:

The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.

There were some immediate responses, such as Thomas Hawk's overwrought contribution, titled "Did Jason Calacanis Just Offer to Hire me for $12,000 a Year?" I mention Thomas' post because it references my post from last year, The Interesting Economy, along with the response it inspired from Caterina Fake, Economies of Interest. I wanted to revisit those posts because it gives me a chance to clarify something.

I wrote the "Interesting Economy" post as a half-formed thought, literally thinking out loud, right before I jumped on a plane. Foolishly, I had asked the (honest) question "So does that mean the right answer for cashing in on my interesting work is to ask for a penny from Yahoo?" Naturally, by the time my flight landed, people seized on this as if I had said "OMG FLICKR OWES ME MONEY".

Which, um, is incorrect. My goal was to have a conversation that I would have easily had over dinner with Caterina and Stewart, not recognizing how that could be colored by the hysterical contributions of the blogosphere peanut gallery. A conversation about how most great web efforts will have to appeal to both people's emotional motivations as well as their financial motivations

The good news is, some great conclusions came out of it. Simply, money is a useful way to reward people, but some things are rewarded by things far more meaningful than mere money. Caterina explained this rather eloquently:

Giving and caring include even the simple acts of putting pieces of yourself on the internet -- your photos, your poems, your words -- and these too are fraught with difficulty when it comes to money.

People will contribute to a community if they feel it's worth their time. Now here's where things get tricky. Some people get mad or defensive when you point out that pontification, punditry, and politics are only a tiny part of the reason people communicate through blogs. Similarly, a lot of people have emotional reactions to the fact that contributions are made to online communities like Wikipedia, Craigslist, Flickr, or yes, Digg, for reasons other than pure monetary value.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money; That's just not why most people use communication tools.

But there's more than one reason to make a brash offer on the web. Business 2.0 points out, "If nothing else, it's a good PR move to raise the awareness among the Digg-erati that Netscape wants their attention." Even the usually mild-mannered Leo Laporte weighs in, stating a truism that should be obvious: "Digg is what it is because of the entire community that participates there. Ditto del.icio.us, and Flicker, and Newsvine."

And that's the most reassuring part for me about Kevin Rose's response to the latest kerfuffle. He addresses the most critical point in making a successful effort on the web.

Listen to your existing community. Think of what your loyal Netscape users must think - you're essentially telling them that they aren't good enough and that you have to buy better users. You can have the best submitters in the world, but if your community doesn't support you it will never work.

I have met both Jason Calacanis and Kevin Rose a number of times, and I genuinely wish them both well with their efforts. They've both built good sites. If either one's a successful, scalable business, then both sites likely are. But you get what you design for.

Netscape will end up with users who value getting paid for their work. Digg will end up with users who are motivated by the desire to contribute to the community. The question is which kind of site you want to participate in, which one makes the web better, which one makes people happier.

Three weeks ago I said I feel strongly we all need to make something meaningful. I think that we're seeing a clear example of how there's going to be a reckoning between the two types of motivations. I'm pretty comfortable with the side I'm on.

Now that Netscape's more or less officially dead, it occurs to me that it might be worthwhile for Google to bankroll the Mozilla Foundation, either by donating a substantial sum or by hiring several of the browser engineers. Google's shown a penchant not just for being "not evil" but for supporting products and companies (ahem) that contribute to the web even if it's not directly in the area of search.

Since Google's all but announced that they're no longer "just search", I'd probably amend my qualms about lack of focus and say that if Google wants to own the entire area of information innovation, they need to be significant contributors to the evolution of Mozilla.

Firebird is, finally, a usable browser, and damn close to the being the best in the world, if it isn't already. Google's shown the ability to get an installable client onto millions of desktops around the world. And they have a user experience focus that would nicely shore up the critical weakness that's dogged Mozilla from day one. If the goal is now organizing and presenting information instead of just being the best search engine, then a browser client focused on information retrieval, search, and management is a great first step. And I'd give them better than even odds at being able to grow that application into a full microcontent client if they were so inclined.

What would be the business model? My mind tells me that a free, open-source browser with built-in hooks to Google services and APIs would be good enough to push increased usage of Google's revenue-generating services and advertising. Microsoft has publicly conceded that they're going for Google's market, and Yahoo threw more than a billion and a half dollars at the Google problem earlier this week. Against those challenges, I'd say the onus is on Google to embrace and extend with a free product that's better than anything the competition can offer: That's what works.

So, a Google browser, based on Mozilla. An easily-justified commitment to cross-platform support and outstanding user experience, based on Google's history of honoring those tenets and the Mozilla organization's inherent preference for them. Culturally, hiring the core members of the Mozilla dev team would be an extraordinarily easy fit. And, frankly, it'd probably require little more development resources, bandwidth, or staffing than the Pyra acquisition did.

I'd pay $500 for a Google-branded microcontent management platform based on the Mozilla core if it were scriptable, stable, and integrated API-neutral blogging and aggregation tools. Or I'd pay $150 annually. So, Google, are you guys game for taking your position as a platform vendor seriously?