Web Shorts

Excite@Home: We're getting out of the portal biz
Excite@Home appears ready to bail out of the narrowband portal business. During an investor's conference call yesterday, Excite@Home chairman George Bell announced the intention of focusing exclusively on its broadband business. Towards that end, the company announced it will sell or restructure all of its media units that don’t directly relate to its broadband operations. The decision marks an abrupt tactical change since @Home bought Excite two years ago, hoping to break into the then-red-hot portal space. Back then, Excite was the No. 2 portal. These days, it’s more like the No. 5 portal, behind AOL Time Warner, Yahoo, MSN and Lycos, according to Nielsen//NetRatings figures for the week ending April 8. Excite@Home was going to attempt to become the AOL of broadband. But these days, Wall Street doesn’t smile upon money-losing internet companies, which Excite@Home continues to be. Slumping online ad sales have contributed to the company’s losses, it says.

Black-outs at CNN.com and MSNBC.com
Two top news web sites have experienced site outages this week. CNN’s web site was inaccessible for four hours on Monday afternoon, and MSNBC.com was inaccessible for two hours yesterday afternoon, starting around 5:30 EDT. Just one in 10 site visitors were able to access CNN.com, and MSNBC was letting very few people through. The cause of the MSNBC outage has not yet been determined, although company officials say it wasn’t any sort of malicious attack. CNN.com has, in the past, been a high-profile hacking victim. Indeed, denial-of-service attacks, in which attackers bombard a web site with so many requests for information that legitimate web surfers can’t break through, resemble both sites’ outages. But this time around, CNN's problem stemmed from internal technical difficulties. Apparently, one of CNN.com’s domain name servers failed because of discrepancies in the software that controls its servers.

Snowball slashes staff as it faces delisting
Teen-oriented web network Snowball has laid off 55 people, which amounts to a third of its staff. Popular sites within the network include ChickClick.com, HighSchoolAlumni.com and PowerStudents.com. Additionally, the company announced that it has received a delisting warning from the Nasdaq because its stock price has been trading at less than $1. The company has asked the Nasdaq Listings Qualification Panel to review its decision, which will postpone any firm decisions on delisting. With the delisting warning and multiple rounds of layoffs, Snowball exhibits many of the classic signs of impending dot.com death. It fired 20 percent of its workforce, or 36 people, back in January. Last month, it orchestrated a reverse stock split in a desperate attempt to boost the price of its stock. Its popularity, according to figures from Media Metrix, has declined as well. Ranked as high as 26th among the web's top 50 most popular sites last June, Snowball has slipped to No. 49 as of March 2001.

Major airlines get fed OK to run travel site
The Department of Transportation has given airlines the green light to build Orbitz, their own travel site. The five major airlines--American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and Unite--plan to compete with other travel sites such as Travelocity and Expedia. The alliance has sparked antitrust fears and is still under review by the Department of Justice. But the Transportation Department has noted that the company will not stop the airlines from offering the same ticket prices at other travel sites. Nonetheless, the Internet Travel Services Association, which speaks for internet travel services such as Travelocity and Lowestfare.com, has expressed disappointment over the Transportation Department’s decision and still believes that the enterprise is anticompetitive. Orbitz will launch in June, and the Transportation Department says it will act if the site behaves in an anticompetitive way.

Last-minute filers rush to tax sites
Procrastinators flocked to tax web sites on Sunday in a rush to file their taxes before Monday’s deadline. About 476,000 unique visitors hit the Internal Revenue Service’s site on Sunday alone--213,000 more people than visited the site the week before, according to figures from web measurement firm Nielsen//NetRatings. Nielsen//NetRatings also found that commercial tax sites saw lots of traffic. Visits to Intuit’s TurboTax site on Sunday increased 131 percent over the same day a week before. On April 8, 135,531 people visited TurboTax, compared to 313,676 on April 15. Intuit says that more than two million taxpayers used its TurboTax site in the three days before the deadline. According to the IRS, roughly 20 percent of all taxpayers put off filing until the last minute.

Pornsters snap up Idaho town’s web site. Oops.
Caldwell, Idaho, population 25,967: If the name conjures up anything at all, it’s images of desert mountain ranges, not the "Sexy Petite Women" of Pornolio.com. Yet Caldwell’s official web site, Caldwellid.org, has been replaced by just that--a porn site. The incident is a tad more embarrassing than a routine hacking, however. City officials say they neglected to pay their bill to domain-name registry Network Solutions. This left the door open for Pornolio.com, as pornography publishers often snap up expired domain names in an effort to attract new customers who wouldn’t ordinarily get exposed to their advertising. The director of the Caldwell Chamber of Commerce says he thought that the domain name was free. Renewing the domain would have set the city back just $25. The Caldwell Chamber of Commerce has picked another domain name, Caldwellidaho.org, but search engines such as Google still pick up the old address, babes and all. And caldwellid.org will still take you to an X-rated web site.

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