Cool Web 2.0 Stuff on Netscape.com
Imagine a personalized portal, customized to your interests and needs. It could have content from major sources that were based upon what you liked and didn’t like. Okay, big deal, there are lots of these, the most popular of which seems to be My Yahoo. But, now imagine that instead of just pushing the same stories, links, and Yahoo content, it allowed anyone to put any RSS feed they like onto the page. Yup, Google and Yahoo allow that, sure. But imagine it’s at Netscape.com, and the year is 1999. You’ve got the original My Netscape, which brought us something no less innovative and essential to the Web 2.0 experience than RSS.
Sure, it’s long since been abandoned, and was a nightmare to run, but between 1999 and 2001, years before Yahoo, Google, Bloglines, and a thousand other followers built systems to consolidate feeds and deliver them in a personalized way, My Netscape and RSS made it possible for anyone with content to offer up a feed (RDF generation) with links back into the content. There’s neat new ideas on the Netscape.com which we just relaunched — but the whole idea of a people’s portal isn’t really all that new, we’re just trying to do it bigger and better. There’s plenty of room to innovate in the space of “bigger” — bigger is very hard — but there’s something about having been part of the creation of something as universal as RSS which makes me happy to be where I am.
Of course, the next obvious question is, what’s next? It’s nice that we invented something great 7 years ago (then killed it off 5 years ago, only to embrace it again last year), but how do we come up with the next big thing. I’m not totally sure, but I do believe that competition between smart people can produce amazing things, and I’m looking forward to working on some of them.