Netscape’s New Social Bookmarking Homepage: Propeller.com
Amit Chowdhry | Wednesday September 12, 2007 | 1,440 views| Add a Comment
Netscape announced on their company blog that they are moving away their social bookmarking web site to a different location on Sept 6. And then yesterday Netscape announced that they have found a new home, Propeller.com.
There is a lot of controversy that surrounds the Netscape social bookmarking site as the idea itself is a replication of Kevin Roses’ Digg.com. Both Rose and one of the key developers in the Netscape social bookmarking site, Jason Calacanis had often verbally expressed their disapproval of each other especially when Calacanis offered to pay for top Digg users to join Netscape.
Regardless of Calacanis’ actions, Netscape made a good move by switching names.
Why do I think so? Because I read Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat. In this book, Friedman pointed “10 flatteners” that played major roles in globalization. One of the flatteners was when the Berlin wall was brought down and another was when Netscape had their IPO. Clearly Netscape has a reputation to maintain here and they do not need it sullied by the fact that they have a “Digg-clone.” Propeller.com does not have the Netscape brand stapled to it.
In an interview, Wired asked Friedman to explain why the Netscape IPO was a flattener. To which Friedman replied,
“Three reasons. Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They made the Internet so that Grandma could use it and her grandchildren could use it. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net. And the third is that Netscape triggered the dotcom boom, which triggered the dotcom bubble, which triggered the overinvestment of a trillion dollars in fiber-optic cables.”
Propeller.com seems to be down for now and there’s a chance that the user interface may change to conform to the marketing efforts of Propeller. Once Propeller is up, Pulse 2.0 will write another blog posts about noticeable changes.
Popular
