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News.com is reporting that Netscape will be pulling the plug on it’s own Digg clone. On Netscape’s own blog, the stated reason for the shutdown is, “…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 is apparently returning to it’s roots as a mainstream media and news portal, with a new social news a portion of the site.
The problems began when Netscape decided to try and hire away some of Digg’s top bloggers for the (then) new site. This move was greeted with some hostility from the blogging community, and from there Netscape never really took off in this arena. But is that all they did wrong? As I was reading about Netscape’s attempt to buy bloggers, I couldn’t help but think that the big companies just aren’t getting the whole Web 2.0/Social media scene.
Sure, they talk about “community”, and “social news”, but really all they are trying to do is to ingrain themselves into a “market”. While a community can be a market, market is not the defining word to use. I have friends on face book from all walks of life, age ranges, geographic locations, you name it. There is no single demographic that can be applied. And I only have about 30-odd people in my contacts over there. What about those social butterflies who have hundreds? Walmart created a facebook group called Roommate Style Match in an attempt to garner some back to school sales, and a quick look at the wall posts leads me to believe that it wasn’t as well received as Walmart might have hoped.
What do you expect? Any community that can be bought will always be subject to the highest bidder. That’s point number one. Point number two is that such a community will be one where trust is hard to come by, and trust is of paramount importance in an online social network. You can only gain that trust by becoming valuable to the community, giving far more than you take. Any attempt to sell to a community will be seen as just that, an attempt to sell. It does not matter how much you dress it up with the latest “hot” words (community, social news), it is still an attempt to take more than to give. So much for trust.
Netscape, Walmart, and all the other companies that are trying to “tap into the market” are not our friends. Sure they may offer good stuff for sale, but that’s not what our communities are necessarily about. A community is about people. Not goods and services, markets and demographics, but plain ordinary people. And as long as they think of us as “users” who are looking for a “social news experience” they will never win new customers via these means. Indeed, they may even wind up alienating existing customers. Er, excuse me, “users”.
Technorati Tags: Netscape, Digg, Social News
Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 6:26 pmand is filed under Business, Every day. 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.
