angrykeyboarder@buzznet.com

I keep reading stories around teh Internets™ about how Facebook randomly "punishes" its users for some supposed bad deed, but won't tell them what it is.

Well now it's my turn.  About a week or so ago, I added (or tried to add) friends via the "find a friend" feature (where you copy addresses from your Yahoo!/MSN/Gmail address books).

I gained 4-5 friends this way.

Today one of my frineds on Facebook announced she had a new ID and asked us to add her. So, I followed her instructions only to be greeted with this.:



(Note, In order to protect privacy I've obscured the user's name and photo in this screenshot).


Now as I said, I've added nobody in several days.

And no I'm not going to bother contacting Facebook about it. I've read users that have ended up with zapped accounts when they tried.  I'll just simply ask the user to add me.

But is this FUBAR or what?

I somehow overlooked (till now) this rather significant (semi-recent) news from the world of teh Internets™.


On 28 December 2007, AOL/Netscape announced the end of an era. There will be no further development of Netscape after this month.  The current version (9.0.5  - I'll bet you didn't even realize there was a current version - if you're old enough to remember Netscape from it's "glory days") will continue to receive security patches through the end of this month. All support for Netscape software will cease on 1 February 2008.

Back in the stone age (years, before Dubya pluarlized "Internet"), Netscape was the browser. I remember using its 0.x beta versions in 1994 (before the release of 1.0) on Windows 3.1(!).

I abandoned Mosaic (the original graphical browser) for Netscape (whose developers - notably Marc Andreessen - were also the original developers of Mosaic).

Netscape kicked ass for a few years. Then it all went downhill.  The first "browser wars" began. Microsoft shoved Internet Explorer down everyone's throat.  By 1998-99 Internet Explorer was king. And frankly, Internet Explorer was the better browser by then.

Then in late 1998, AOL bought Netscape Communications.  Netscape fans feared the worst. And AOL did neglect Netscape as feared (and laid off most of it's employees over time). However, the good news was that earlier in 1998 AOL had released the Netscape source code (and to make a long story short) users of Firefox and Thunderbird today have AOL(!) to thank for that (I hate to admit that, but it's true).

Despite the Netscape browser being virtually ignored for years, I'm still sad to see it go.

So for you wise folks who today use Firefox and/or Thunderbird, you can thank the "original" Netscape.  Without Netscape there would have been no Mozilla.org, which is where this most excellent software comes from.

Thank you Netscape, and R.I.P.




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