Propeller.com
Propeller.com
Social news aggregator by AOL-Netscape
Propeller was a social news aggregator operated by AOL-Netscape. It was similar to Digg; 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 was Brian Alvey[2] and the lead developer of the site was Alex Rudloff.[3] It was maintained by Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason 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]