Netscape’s traffic has been going up over the past three months in a major way, and I think it’s because of three main reasons:

• a) the community is learning how to use the site
• b) the tech folks are adding amazing features
• c) the home page has now been balanced to have no more than 2-3 stories from each channel (i.e. it’s not all politics all day long any more).
• d) we solved the spam/group voting problems (by adding a bunch of very talented Navigators!)

Today the tech team launched two extensions we were working on for the past month–AND THEY ARE AMAZING!

Oh wait… I don’t work at Netscape any more.

I’m so proud of the team over there… Netscape is going to double in traffic over the first year–you heard it hear first!

best j

From the Netscape blog:

Today we released two Firefox extensions that hook into Netscape.com: the Sitemail Notifier extension and the Friends’ Activity Sidebar. We hope that these extensions will allow you to get even more value out of Netscape. Both extensions are compatible with Firefox 1.5 through 2.0.0.* as well as the latest release of Flock.

Sitemail Notifier

The Sitemail Notifier extension adds a button (shown below) to your toolbar that indicates when you have new sitemail messages at Netscape.com. Clicking the button will bring you to your messages page.

Figure 1: The two main states of the sitemail button.

Friends’ Activity Sidebar

The Friends’ Activity Sidebar (FAS) extension helps you keep tabs on what stories your Netscape friends are submitting and commenting on. A new toolbar button (shown below) features Chad, the older, more mature brother of AOL’s little yellow chat mascot. When there is new activity by your friends (i.e., a new comment or a new story submission), the button will be activated and Chad will send a friendly wave your way. Clicking on the activated button will open a list of your friends’ activity in the sidebar, allowing you to easily browse their stories and comments. Each time you view your friends’ activity, you will only be shown activity that is new since the last time you opened the sidebar.

Figure 2: The two main states of the FAS button.

Note: The sidebar limits activity to five stories/comments for each friend. To view more of a friend’s recent activity, click on their avatar or username to be sent to that friend’s profile.

Figure 3: The Friends’ Activity Sidebar

Suggestions for future extensions or improvements on these extensions are most definitely welcome.