September 12th, 2007
Propeller.com - Netscape's digg-experiment lives on
Despite being given notice of eviction at Netscape.com, AOL’s social news site — the so-called “Digg-clone” started by Jason Calacanis — will soon get a new name and new home at Propeller.com.
Talk of the “dead pool” was a little premature it seems.
Having said that, there is no doubt that without the prime real estate of Netscape.com, “Propeller” will have a much tougher time attracting visitors and/or maintaining the interest of its existing social news community. In addition, as noted previously, the site no longer has Calacanis fighting its corner.
However, in some ways the migration and re-branding of AOL’s social news experiment could actually benefit the site. For a start, it will no longer be burdened with the Netscape.com brand, with its checkered history and strong ties to a traditional portal-loving userbase. But it goes further — Propeller.com’s user numbers can be evaluated in their own right, and should no longer be compared to the traffic of the previous version of Netscape.com. Living in the shadow of one of the Internet’s oldest brands, both helped and hindered AOL’s social news venture.
But more importantly, by discarding all of the Netscape baggage, we get to better test the Calacanis model of a social news site on its own merits (which takes the basic Digg ingredients: user submissions and voting of stories and puts in place a higher layer of editors and paid “scouts”).
As Muhammad Saleem, a Netscape scout, writes on his own blog in reference to the new name and location:
… on a very basic level the name symbolizes socially driven news. interacting with content by submitting, voting, commenting, and sharing interesting, entertaining, and otherwise important news items. but more than that it symbolizes what netscape plans to do going forward, i.e. propel the social news model into the next generation through a mix of fixing the problems with the current generation and innovation.
You see, for all the talk of other social news sites as digg-clones, there is still plenty of room for innovation in the social news space. The Digg-formula, as it stands, is far from perfected — with a number of problems that urgently need to be fixed (accountability of the ‘bury brigade’?). Whether or not Propeller.com will be the one to fix them remains to be seen, but at least they’ll get to continue trying.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
