I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the New Netscape is doomed.

It won’t be successful, people won’t do what Netscape wants them to do, and Netscape will revert back to something more like what it used to be within 6 months.

Netscape is not a Digg-ish site: people can “vote” for their favorite stories. OK, that’s not a horrible idea, even if they are copying Digg and others, and trying to cash in on the whole social web meme.

But any site that starts its first page like this is doomed (see below). Instructions on how to use a web site? What were they thinking!

That in itself is the kiss of death: if it’s so non-obvious they have to put step 1, step 2, all the way to step 5 on the page, they’re toast.

Richard McManus has covered this on Read/Write Web.

Tags: netscape, digg, social media, doomed, john koetsier