Netscape Netcenter

» see home.netscape.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

netcenter was netscape's answer to what the default new-tab page was worth. in june 1997 they turned home.netscape.com from a corporate landing page into a portal with news, stock quotes, weather, email, a personalized start page, and a directory of the web. by early 1998 they were reporting twenty million registered users, and the portal itself was the second most-visited property on the whole web behind yahoo.

the leverage was the browser. every install of netscape navigator opened to home.netscape.com by default. in 1997 that meant close to seventy percent of everyone using the web loaded netcenter on launch, whether they had ever heard of the brand or not. this is what portal traffic actually was in the late nineties: a browser homepage that no one had bothered to change.

i was on the internet through netscape communicator in 1998 on a 33.6k modem via ttnet, and my browser opened to netcenter every time i dialed in. i did not think of it as a destination. it was where you landed while the modem finished handshaking. the weather widget on the top-right was set to san francisco by default and i never changed it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

netcenter's product surface was wide. you could set a myNetscape personalized page. you could get an @netscape.net webmail account through the mci-run mail backend. you could search the web through a search box that pulled from excite results early on. you could read the aggregated news feed from ap and reuters. the pitch was that this was the entire web packaged behind one url that already opened on your machine.

the excite portal war of 1997-1998 pushed netcenter into a defensive posture. by 1998 excite had passed netcenter in reach in some months. yahoo was pulling away above both of them. netcenter was already the third-place portal in a market where third place did not sustain the ad rates of first place. that dynamic was the frame behind aol's bid.

~ the aol chapter ~

aol announced the netscape acquisition on 24 november 1998 for $4.2 billion in stock. the deal closed in march 1999. inside aol, netcenter was not the flagship it had been standalone. aol had its own portal at aol.com and a proprietary walled-garden client that never really left the dial-up world. netcenter had to sit next to both of them without cannibalizing.

the resolution was slow decay. between 1999 and 2001 aol trimmed netcenter features into aol properties. mynetscape got folded down. netscape mail moved onto aol's mail backend and the standalone search box switched to google in 2002. by january 2000 netcenter's unique visitor count had dropped to around 347 thousand in a month where yahoo was pulling 37 million and aol.com was pulling 26 million.

~ the day it died ~

the netcenter brand was quietly retired as part of aol's july 2003 disbanding of the netscape division. the last home.netscape.com pages carrying the netcenter name went dark by early 2004. the domain rolled over to a plain netscape.com portal without the netcenter word on it. the redesign in 2006 turned it into a digg-clone community news aggregator run by jason calacanis. that experiment reverted to a normal portal in 2007 and the whole netscape.com property was folded out completely when aol wound down the netscape brand on 1 march 2008.

if you loaded netcenter from a fresh netscape communicator install in the 1998-2000 window, you were part of the largest single browser-homepage-portal audience the web has ever had. that audience did not know the product name. it was just what the browser opened. that is what made netcenter both dominant and disposable at the same time.

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