Propeller was a
social news aggregator operated by
AOL-
Netscape
Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was o ...
. It was similar to
Digg
Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...
; 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.
The Chief Architect of the site was
Brian Alvey
Brian Alvey (born March 6, 1970, in Falls Church, Virginia) is an American serial entrepreneur, programmer, designer and blogger. He grew up in Brooklyn and now lives in San Francisco where he is the CTO of Automattic's WordPress VIP Platform. ...
and the lead developer of the site was Alex Rudloff. It was maintained by
Weblogs, Inc. CEO
Jason Calacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis (born November 28, 1970) is a podcaster, American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, and author.
His first company was part of the Dot-com bubble, dot-com era in New York. His second venture, Weblogs, Inc., a publishi ...
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.
Alexa Internet- Netscape.com Traffic
Retrieved on 2007-09-20
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.
Anchors
Propeller had several "anchors", which were led by James 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.
Scouts
Propeller also paid a small number of power users called Scouts. This group was run by Ryan Budke and made up of Weblogs, Inc. bloggers, Propeller power users and celebrities, including Wil 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 the Netscape Navigator
The 1990s releases of the Netscape (web browser), Netscape line referred to as Netscape Navigator were a series of now discontinued web browsers. from versions 1 to 4.08. It was the Core product, flagship product of the Netscape, Netscape Comm ...
browser, at which point the name was changed to avoid confusion.
See also
* Mixx
References
External links
TechCrunch Search Engine JournalSearch Engine Watch
{{Use mdy dates, date=October 2012
AOL
American news websites
Social bookmarking
News aggregators
Defunct websites
Netscape