The New Netscape

posted by hal…….

As reported by Reuters, The New York Times and others, Netscape came back to life this morning as an uber-news and blog aggregator. Jason Calacanis, famous for Silicon Alley Reporter and Engadget, is the driving force behind the push to re-invigorate Netscape in it’s new guise as an AOL service.

Nothing wrong with the concept – a lot of others are doing it, so why not jump on the band wagon? You weren’t expecting anything original were you?

I checked it out. Tried to sign up, maybe loft a comment. Sign-up didn’t work on Safari. Didn’t work on Firefox. I went to the trouble of downloading the Netscape browser (7.2 for Mac) – the site still choked on sign-up.

Honestly – today, tomorrow, the middle of next week – it doesn’t matter when you launch a new service AS LONG AS IT WORKS. This would seem to be especially true for a damaged brand like Netscape.

Will I go back to the site? Maybe. Maybe not.

The New Netscape – probably as irrelevant as the old Netscape.