Update: My pal Sean Bonner rips on MySpace for page goosing nonsense.
Update2: Make sure you go vote this story on digg! http://digg.com/tech_news/Netscape_Adds_in_Site_Mail

A very large percentage of MySpace traffic comes from the fact that they have site mail. Many young people I talk to don’t use IM any more, they use the slow and ugly version: MySpace site mail. It’s crazy because doing IM on a web page is slow, requiring multiple page loads. However, there is an advantage to it: you don’t need to add anyone to your IM client and you don’t need to download a client.

Anyway, the people have spoken and a large percentage of them love site-based mail/IM.

We’ve added it to the top-level of Netscape today (we’ve been testing it a couple of layers down since the start).

If you go to a story page (permalink page) you will see “Send Message” next to people’s names now (see images below). We have this for both the person who submitted the story and for the people who are commenting.

Also, instead of taking you to another page it pops open a nice little AJAX box so we don’t waste your time. We could have made this take 3-4 pages like MySpace does, but we decided to give up the page views in exchange for the user experience. I hate the fact that MySpace makes you load 3-4 pages to get to your mail–it’s so obvious that they are goosing the page views. This is always a bad idea, because those folks click through the pages super fact and never look–let alone click–on the advertisements. This makes your advertisers upset because they think your site doesn’t perform. It’s a horrible design philosophy.

What do you guys think? Kind of slick huh?