Propeller Gets Ugly Makeover

At times, competition brings out the best in people. And then there are those times when competition makes people fold like a guy with a lowly pair in a high stakes game of Texas Hold 'em.

It seems the folks over at AOL were tired of lagging behind Digg in the social news department. After seeing Yahoo hit a home run with Yahoo Buzz, they decided to go out on a limb and try something new.

Now, Propeller was never going to win any awards in the beauty department. And the new-look Propeller is probably a slight upgrade over the old version despite that horrible shade of blue. But they do seem to have broken one of the fundamental aspects of social news sites: surfing new stories.

The major change to Propeller is a move away from the standard voting scheme of most social news sites. This is replaced by a 10 point scale. It's a neat idea, but it is difficult to say whether or not it will work in the long run. Generally speaking, people assume a 10 point scale is a rating. And while votes for an article will raise it towards a 10, new articles will rate high simply because of being new, and old articles will no doubt rate low simply because of being old.

But the biggest head scratcher comes when you click on the "Just In" tab. While every other social news site in the entire universe thinks it is a good idea to have a section that displays recently added articles, the folks at AOL think you'll be more interested in seeing who's voting for what in real time.

And, hey, this feature might be pretty cool -- if it didn't completely replace a list of new articles.

It's definitely a strange decision to do away with a feature that many people on social news sites like to use. But, I suppose when you are taking big risks you might as well take really big risks.

The new Propeller does have one very big thing going for it: it's not the same old social news site that we see everywhere else. That alone might be enough to attract some traffic.