Propeller.com

» see propeller.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

by 2007, when netscape.com's social-news feature relaunched as its own domain propeller.com, digg had already taken the english-language social-news slot. propeller was aol's second attempt to catch a market that had moved without them. from a distance in ankara, where digg was the site my rss reader pulled tech links from around 2007 to 2008, propeller.com was a name that appeared in tech-blog write-ups and never once as a link someone had actually forwarded.

the story begins under a different name. in june 2006 aol handed the netscape.com portal to jason calacanis, then head of the aol-owned weblogs incorporated. calacanis relaunched netscape.com as a user-voted news site, essentially digg with the netscape brand and a paid layer of editorial anchors picking front-page stories alongside the community. the anchors were a differentiator from digg, which ran on pure vote-based ranking. the anchor role was structured so that human editors could surface stories that had votes but had not yet trended, and the anchors were paid, which made the whole thing partway between digg and a normal editorial newsroom.

calacanis left aol in november 2006 after roughly five months, and the netscape.com social-news site continued under other leadership through 2007. the anchor program shrank. the user community persisted but never grew into digg-scale traffic. the pattern was the standard second-place shape of the social-news market, real users, a working product, no cultural pull.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

in september 2007 aol renamed the whole thing propeller.com and moved it off the netscape.com url. netscape.com went back to a general portal skin. the rebrand was framed as a way to protect the netscape name from the social-news experiment, which is a phrasing you use when the experiment is not working. brian alvey stayed on as chief architect and alex rudloff led development. tom drapeau ran the site through its final years.

propeller.com kept the anchor system and the voting layer under the new name. some visible relaunch investment went into a new site design, but the user base did not grow into the redesign. digg by 2007 had roughly 15 million monthly unique visitors, propeller was an order of magnitude below.

~ the funny part ~

propeller.com actually outlived its own irrelevance by two years. the site's traffic curve had flattened by 2008, but aol kept it running through 2009 and into 2010 without much visible investment. this was a normal aol pattern for that stretch, keep the product hosted on the assumption that shutting it down would only produce bad press and small savings. when the shutdown eventually came on 1 october 2010, it drew a short techcrunch write-up and not much else. the community that had voted on stories for four years scattered to digg proper, which was itself heading into its own long decline within twelve months.

~ what got buried ~

the aol social-news bet, and by extension the wider corporate-owned second-place digg clone class. yahoo tried this pattern with yahoo buzz and killed it in 2011. msn tried something similar. every major portal in 2006 had a social-news feature bolted somewhere on the property because digg's numbers had suggested a category. propeller was aol's version of that bet, run for longer than most because calacanis's original launch had produced enough press to make shutting it down look like an admission.

the netscape brand kept eroding through this whole window. the netscape 9 browser was killed in early 2008, netscape.com became a portal skin, then propeller.com went dark, then aol lifestream absorbed most of what was left of the netscape identity. by 2010 there was almost no operating product carrying the netscape name into the next decade.

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