 | This articlerelies excessively onreferences toprimary sources. Please improve this article by addingsecondary or tertiary sources. Find sources: "Propeller.com" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(January 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Propeller was asocial news aggregator operated byAOL-Netscape. It was similar toDigg; users could vote for which stories are to be included on the front page and could comment on them as well. As of October 1, 2010, Propeller ceased to be active.[1]
The Chief Architect of the site wasBrian Alvey[2] and the lead developer of the site was Alex Rudloff.[3] It was maintained byWeblogs, Inc. CEOJason Calacanis until he left AOL in November 2006. The last director was Tom Drapeau. Netscape's market share had been declining for over a year at the time of the change over.[4]
Propeller was hosted on the Netscape.com domain from June 2006 to September 2007 when it was replaced by the AOL Netscape generic portal.
The previous version of Propeller was released to mixed reactions. Some users liked that they had more participation ability while others found the pages to be harder to navigate and not as structured. Soon after the release of the new site, a story entitled "Netscape's Blunder" was the top rated story.[5]
Propeller had several "anchors", which were led byJames Marcus, who work on maintaining the site and featuring stories in the "anchor picks" box on the home page. This creates a slightly different environment from Digg, as Digg's homepage rankings are based solely on user votes, where Propeller's are based on both. The rest of the team includes Alexia Prichard.
Propeller also paid a small number of power users called Scouts. This group was run byRyan Budke and made up ofWeblogs, Inc. bloggers, Propeller power users and celebrities, includingWil Wheaton. Other scouts included bloggers such as Jeff Hoard, Angry Ken, Karina Longworth, Steve Head, Greg DeMaderios, Henry Wang, Digidave, TweekerChick and Corey Spring. These users were called Navigators until the relaunch of theNetscape Navigator browser, at which point the name was changed to avoid confusion.