New views of Netscape Homepage/Hive

Filed under: Netscape

The Netscape homepage has been taken over by political stories. I hate politics, and seeing 1/3rd of the stories on the home page related to "Bush Sucks/Is Great" stories has really burned many of the users out.

You see, people vote 2-3x as much on political stories and they comment 10-30x a much on those same stories. So, we're gonna change the home page to be one of the two below (descriptions by CK from his post on the issue):

http://www.netscape.com/hometest/ This first variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 10 Channels at any given time, and then it pulls the top 3 stories from each of the top 5 channels and the top 2 stories from each of the next 5 channels and ranks these stories on the Homepage. As a result, no single channel will ever have more than 3 stories on the homepage, but only the top 10 channels will ever appear in the rankings.
http://www.netscape.com/hometest1/ This second variant of the homepage checks to see what are the top 25 Channels at any given time, and then it displays the top story from each of those channels and ranks them.

Of course, we are stilling going to have a straight ranking available for folks, but as a scale business we need a balanced view.

My vote is for the "top story from the top 25 channels" because:

a) it gives users the cream of the crop--all #1 stories.
b) it gives users more motivation to post to the smaller channels (i.e. books, travel, etc) because they can now break onto the home page.
c) it will drive folks to the channel pages for the fuller experience (i.e. the political folks can go to the politics page to battle it out amongst themselves.

What do you guys think?

Note: Yes, we might let users set their own home page style.

Nov 3rd 2006 11:49AM
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1. I'd prefer three from the top ten, it's broad enough to help diversify the content with a little depth for the ten categories. Although then the main content would resemble the right hand side of the site.

I like the possibility of it being a user controled option as well.

Posted at 1:09PM on Nov 3rd 2006 by Mintyfunk

2. What about not limiting the number of stories from each channel, but instead weighting stories based on their ranking? That is, the #1 story in each channel gets a big boost, #2 not so much, #3 even less, etc.

Posted at 1:18PM on Nov 3rd 2006 by Toivo Lainevool

3. I would have to agree w/ Minty up top: Give users the choice to customize their view ... but start by presenting the 10 x 3 layout.

Given the user base, I would probably give them a canned view up front, and provide a nav w/ drop-downs to customize. But nothing too detailed.

As great as many personalization sites are, my guess is that too many options turns off the average Joe from doing anything. Am I wrong?

Posted at 3:46PM on Nov 3rd 2006 by michael

4. How about an option to ditch the left column and replace it with the right, i.e. make the categories clear (like Google News).

As for 2.5x10 vs. 1x25, I suspect that only testing will show which more people prefer. And, explicit tabs with those two and similar variations are probably worth doing to make "customization" ultra-easy ... there's no need for someone to commit to a specific preference.

Per another comment: while it's certainly a matter of taste, I'll vote against the BBC interface. Maybe the ideas have merit, but the implementation is flawed: it only uses a tiny bit of screen thus hides all the good stuff.

Posted at 8:50AM on Nov 5th 2006 by Scott Lawton

5. Hey Jason, I just posted a story on Netscape for the first time ever. Nice interface. I noticed the word "nigga" was stripped from my title though. Do u guys censor the neo N-word?

The piece I blogged is write here and not particularly offensive: http://www.rapspace.tv/member/mmg/blog-entry/nigga-moment

Let a brotha know yo.

MMG

Posted at 3:13PM on Nov 5th 2006 by MMG

6. Cool! When I was giving a talk on the round-table about web 2.0 here in Russia, I said that Netscape is out of our interest because the front page is all about American politics. Hey, Jason, you read my mind! :)

Posted at 5:16PM on Nov 6th 2006 by Dmitry Chestnykh

7. I think, that users should choose a kind convenient for them.

Posted at 1:49AM on Nov 12th 2006 by slider

8. First option (5x3+5x2). One goes to the home page to see what is hot full stop; not what is top of each channel.
But, hey, why not have a few tabs with all the different options like the BBC does:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm

(If you don't know this interface you should try it. It's lovely)

Posted at 5:40PM on Nov 13th 2006 by Rodrigo Dauster

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