Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Propeller.com http://pulse2.com Sun, 27 May 2012 18:16:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 Propeller.com Shuts Down http://pulse2.com/2010/09/26/propeller-com-shuts-down/ http://pulse2.com/2010/09/26/propeller-com-shuts-down/#comments Sun, 26 Sep 2010 21:03:08 +0000 Amit Chowdhry http://pulse2.com/?p=35789 Continue reading →]]>
Propeller.com is a social media link-sharing website that is similar to Digg.com and Reddit.com. Somebody submits a story and if it gains enough popularity, that story hits the homepage. Propeller.com was created out of an experiment by AOL subsidiary Netscape.

The Propeller.com project was headed by Weblogs Inc. co-founder Jason Calacanis. After AOL bought out Weblogs, Calacanis started to head up Propeller.com. One of the reasons why Propeller.com did not take off is because of its terrible design.

Calacanis and Digg co-founder Kevin Rose had beef with each other after the creation of Propeller.com too. Supposedly Calacanis paid some of Digg’s top users to join Propeller and become just as influential on that service as well. But the two ended their quarrels after they met on a podcast show.

[SearchEngineWatch]

]]> http://pulse2.com/2010/09/26/propeller-com-shuts-down/feed/ 1 Netscape’s New Social Bookmarking Homepage: Propeller.com http://pulse2.com/2007/09/12/netscapes-new-social-bookmarking-homepage-propellercom/ http://pulse2.com/2007/09/12/netscapes-new-social-bookmarking-homepage-propellercom/#comments Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:35:14 +0000 Amit Chowdhry http://pulse2.com/2007/09/12/netscapes-new-social-bookmarking-homepage-propellercom/ Continue reading →]]> Propeller.com LogoNetscape 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.

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