Really thrilled to see Brian pull off his vision over at ComicMix. It's gorgeous and really well implemented. If your a comic fan, go get used to this site. They'll be making a lot of noise in the future.

Helped Launch Netscape.com

It was June 15th that we put the beta Netscape online. Love it or hate it, we certainly made waves ;)

It was a project I wasn't initially supposed to be involved with, at least, not to the extent that I was. When Jason and Brian took over the netscape.com domain, I was offered the opportunity to go to AOL sort of as a netscape/weblogs, inc contact for Blogsmith. Gavin, Mike and I had been working on Blogsmith for a few months and Blogsmith was a small indie startup still. Moving one of us to the "inside" made sense.

At some point last March, the three of us flew out to meet the Netscape team at the Viceroy in Santa Monica. One thing led to another, and I was asked to be the lead developer for the project through the product launch. The next couple of months were absolutely insane. Kathryn was out in California so I was left on my own in DC and pretty much worked around the clock. We launched the beta on June 15, 2006 and then spent the next month or two cleaning things up. We overloaded the servers, we got hacked, we had less functionality than we initially anticipated, we had scope creep into areas we didn't plan for -- you name it, and we dealt with it, all in a very short amount of time for a project of that size.

My reason for joining Netscape was to tackle the challenge of launching under such a tight deadline. Once things calmed down and things were humming along, Blogsmith happened to be purchased by AOL. I was able to slowly (perhaps without his full knowing/understanding) delegate most everything to Tom (suckah!), and transfer back to rejoin Gavin, Mike and by then, Celly on the Blogsmith project.

I was the first to drop off Netscape I guess, soon followed by Jason and then C.K.. The current team though is absolutely incredible and firing on all cylinders. The developers over there are top notch and working on some amazing technology that will certainly shake things up when its released.

It's been a hell of a year and a half personally, and Netscape is a big part of the story. I'll never forget someone ease dropping on our conversations out in LA, seeing it posted in the Digg comments and then everyone successfully burying it before it gained any strength. Riding segways around Venice with groups of people yelling "Freaks!!" at us and Jason, for some reason, acting like a Robot the whole time. Or discussing the merits of the Viceroy's amazingly delicious bacon with Wil Wheaton. Of course, using the then newly launched Emurse.com to staff up was enjoyable as well ;) (nod to Finke) (yea, I know, a plug.. I couldn't help myself)

I think the biggest lessons I learned was to sleep when I'm tired (oops), how to work with a boss like Jason (notoriously demanding) , script kiddies will always find a way, script kiddies don't like being called script kiddies, when talking to the press you're always on record and most importantly, anything in any amount of time is possible if you have a dedicated and focused enough team. Distance be damned.

Congrats on a successful first year for Netscape.com (the social edition). I absolutely can not wait to see the things planned for the next year. Trey and his team are men amongst men, and Tom's dedication and leadership holds great promise for the entire Netscape brand. Keep it up guys -- NETSCAPE FTW!

UPDATE: I've been quoted in the Netscape article on the same topic, "Happy Birthday, Netscape"

Original Weblogs, Inc management currently employed by AOL (in order of departure):

• Jason Calacanis
• Judith Meskill
  
• Brian Alvey
  

Mad congrats to Brian for making the jump. ComicMix.com, his new startup, is a "blue flame" project for him, and I couldn't be more excited to see him doing something he loves full time. Transitioning from a start up mentality to the AOL mentality is brutal, and may in fact be impossible. I'm sure he's anxious to get back into the ring for another go at it.

Again, congrats Brian, and thanks for everything you've taught us.

One year ago today, after speaking briefly with Brian twice on the phone, I quit my job as a contractor on a military project to join my business partner on a little startup project called Blogsmith. I left the office and went straight to the airport to board a plane for NYC. We were up all night coding the parts of the CMS that were slated to be demoed the next day at Winstock 2005. The next day, we streamed the UCF game in the 75 Rock boardroom while Mike passed out on the floor. I went from a government mandated 40 hour work week, to working a 30 hour day. There was no contract, no written agreements and I wasn't even sure there was going to be a paycheck. Gavin and I figured, at best, we had food on the table until February.

The past year has been a great one professionally. First Blogsmith as an independent company, then AOL for the Netscape re-launch, then back to Blogsmith as an AOL property. We wrote Emurse the July before all this started, which admittedly we had to shelve for a bit, but it too found traction. We juggled 3 major projects this year and I've spent more than 75% of the year living out of a suitcase (I just added it up...). I feel as if I haven't stopped since I boarded that plane to New York. It's been a heck of a trip.

Me, Mike, Gavin, and Celly at the bar outside of the Portofino. Missing from the picture is Brian Alvey, Puggles, Christoph, and all of our new AOL friends.

The world is an office. Or at least.. The bar is.

Last night I went out with Brian Alvey for a few drinks and dinner. It's great not because he's my boss, but because he's someone that I consider to be a friend and an inspiration as well. He's the guy who young techie entreprenuers like myself look at in awe of his ability to balance both work and family.

Brian's the technical mastermind behind all of this stuff that I've been a part of recently. He is Jason's business partner and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. Blogsmith is his vision and his baby. He's the Chief Architect of the new Netscape.

Basically, he's the professor to our X-men.

Without Brian around solving our scaling issues, or figuring out the ad framework, or the traffic metrics, or ranking formulas, or handling our personnel issues, or taking care of our hosting configuration, or organizing and leading our code jams, or even simply talking me (and I'm sure others) off the occasional cliff -- None of this would be real.

So, yeah -- Congrats on all of it Brian. We truly appreciate (and admire) everything that you do.

Oh, and thanks for dinner ;)

So yeah, the thing I haven't been able to talk about the last 3 or 4 months? The reason I've lost touch with friends and family? I'm the lead developer of the new Netscape.com.

Yesterday, as you probably read about in the New York Times, Techcrunch, Digg, Slashdot, or other major media outlet, we launched the newest generation of the Netscape brand. It's a social news site blending together professional journalism and user submitted content. It's a beta and certainly not without its flaws, but we think it's a hell of an initial "release."

On the Experience...

It's been a hell of a ride. Again, we wrote this thing in 3 or 4 months from scratch. We kept nothing of the existing netscape.com code base. We modeled the framework after the Blogsmith framework (which I worked on with Gavin Hall, the dev lead on Blogsmith and Weblogs, Inc., and also my long standing business partner), so we kinda had a decent idea of scalability and performance. (Blogsmith runs Engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc, and most recently, TMZ.)

The Netscape tech team is absolutely top notch. Brian Alvey is our chief architect and a super hero. Trey, Tom, Craig, Andy, and MIke Propst are just amazing at what they do. Combine that with the incrediable journalists we have as anchors and the fact that Calacanis can sell a feather to a pimp -- it's bound to be entertaining. The experience was (is) even more enjoyable simply because we all get along so well. We're kind of like a techie street gang.

On Launch...

Seriously.. Who showed Jason how to use iChat?! Now I have a giant, upset Jason staring at me when things aren't working right. Talk about pressure. ;) It's all good though, while some prefer email and IM, I guess I'm just a little more traditional with the face-to-face. Having the video going made it really easy to communicate with the folks up at 75 rock. God bless the internet.

It wasn't a perfect launch, we had amazing amounts of traffic and media coming in right from the very first minute, but we've learned a lot and it'll make us a better site going forward. Beta is about exposing weaknesses and fixing them, and I think we accomplished that (and will continue to do so).

Mad props go out to the hosting staff at AOL -- Matt Dunbar, who has stayed up with us on the damn-near-all-nighters, Adam Leff who we paged out of bed last night, Joe Gibbs, Kevin Pettit, Jacob and everyone else who puts up with our annoying help-us phone calls -- the list could take up an entire blog post. Much love.

On Digg...

I'll just take it head on -- of course we modeled ourselves after digg. It's an iteration, and a huge compliment to Digg itself. We're validating social news on a much more mainstream level. Are we a "digg killer," uh, no. Was digg a slashdot killer? I still check both. It's not a zero sum kinda thing. I pay for slashdot, and I would gladly pay for digg. I don't need to pay for Netscape, cause well, we have enough ad's to cover it........ (ahem) yeeaaah...

Digg wasn't the first site in the social news space by a long shot. Hell, I wrote a half assed attempt at it six years ago. My version failed, just like most of the others before Digg. Digg succeeded because Kevin Rose and his team did a hell of a job.

I know there's a lot of uproar from the Digg army about how close our site looks to Digg. Take out the vote badge, and would that still be the case? What then? We use the color yellow? This is web2.0 -- we all use the color yellow. We settled on the badge after playing around with a handful of other metaphors. Props to newsvine by the way, I love that damn vote thing. The fact is, Digg got it right. Why would we not do something that we thought was the best of the bunch? We could invent something else I'm sure, but seriously -- 3 months. That was our schedule. There's bigger fish to fry.

On Anchors...

Seriously. How cool is the idea of taking professional journalists, and throwing them into the mix of a social driven site? Users suggest the news, vote on the news, and the news gets covered by the people and by the folks who are paid to research things. If you can't see the power in that, then well, your just a hater ;) C.K. and the gang are going to be the jam.

Speaking of Hate...

Thanks for the QA Valleywag. Also, lots of people freaking out about the frame navigator -- it's going to be a preference that users can turn off forever and ever, we promise. The best possible way to measure response to it is to throw it out there. Lots of people like it (if your in firefox, use j to move forward, k to move backwards, v to vote, etc... its neat), lots of people don't. Sounds like the perfect thing to make a preference out of.

As far as the ads go.. Our hands are kinda tied. We promise to clearly mark anything thats an ad as an ad. We promise to get rid of the really horrible ones as soon as we can. Hopefully, we'll be able to come up with ad placement that makes everyone happy. We've been in beta for exactly 24 hours now.

On Features...

I'm just now allowed to blog about this thing, god knows I'm probably not supposed to blab away about upcoming features. I can tell you though, we have some really neat things coming down the pipe that will help seperate netscape from the "digg clone" category. Again, or goal isn't to be another digg. It's to be a social news site. That's it. Look for really neat tie in's to the anchor stuff. Also, I'm a huge fan of tagging and the like, so, hopefully we'll be able to get us-some-of-that (more than we have). And obviously, RSS/JSS on damn near everything. Oh, and whatever Digg v3.0 does, cause, all the haters bring in lots of traffic..... ;)

On Feedback...

We're listening. Leave a comment on someones blog, or use the feedback link on the new netscape site itself (sign in, its in your user info box, top right).

On Blah...

I'm officially pooped. Looking forward to decent sleep tonight and maybe a full meal in the morning. My appetite is finally starting to come back now that the caffiene is fading off.. w00t.