Stop Recommending Propeller, Please!
More and more, I see social bookmarkers recommending Propeller as one of the best bookmarking sites. Before their recent face change, I’d have agreed. Now I wouldn’t send my dog to Propeller - even if he thought it was a tree.
What’s So Wrong With Propeller?
It’s the design.
Before the redesign, Propeller had some issues, primarily technical. It was cumbersome, for instance, to try and send a prop to your friends. You could only send bookmarks to five friends and then you had to send another internal message. Plus, if you wanted to bookmark someone else’s material then it was at least a three-step process, and country music was never my thang. Bad puns aside, Propeller had a Coke moment.
The Deep Propeller Analysis
For starters, Propeller now looks like AOLs battered wife. You would think by the top menu that AOL users were the only people who used Propeller. That wasn’t true before the redesign, but it may be true after it. Propeller would have been better off not associating itself with AOL at all.
The color scheme is awful. I loved the previous color scheme despite the aforementioned technical difficulty of sending out props to my friends. And speaking of friends, since the redesign, I’ve lost half of mine. They just disappeared. I went through all that trouble to network with people and add them to my friend’s list only to have Propeller kidnap them and throw them off the plane. Not a smart move.
Propeller’s new architecture makes it look like the female version of Mixx, which isn’t good. I like Mixx, but one of the things that I do like about it is it’s uniqueness. Propeller just stole that away. The layout isn’t exactly like Mixx, but it does have a little bit of a Mixx flavor to it, only softer and more feminine. The hard blue of Propeller’s previous existence is gone and has been replaced by the tampon blue of today. It makes me want to stand in front of the mirror and primp myself until I overdose on the melodic overtones of up-and-coming boy bands.
Note to Propeller: Get rid of the Love Me Tender blue highlights and silly looking Jeeves character and put some meat on for grill.
One Thing Propeller Did Right
The redesign wasn’t a complete loss, however. Propeller did do at least one thing right. It is now easier to vote for stories that have already been submitted. It’s a two-step process. Read it and click on “Prop It”. Simple and easy. I like that.
I do a lot of bookmarking. I’ve worked out a system with some of my friends where we send each other spreadsheets with the names of articles and where they’ve been bookmarked. All I have to do is click on the link in the spreadsheet and bookmark a story. Before, I had to click the link, open the story, and vote. Now, I just click the link and vote. Very simple.
I don’t know, beyond that, whether Propeller has improved its system for sending messages to other users because I’ve decided to limit my use of it based on its design. I don’t like looking at it. It’s ugly, and I don’t date ugly girls. Never did. One thing I did notice, though, was that when other users send me a message to check out a story they want me to vote on, I cannot click the URL of the story. It’s a copy/paste job and that just won’t cut it. I’ll still use Propeller, but it will be on a limited basis. It’s time to re-introduce the original formula. Call the Coca-Cola Company and ask them how well that plan worked for them.
In Other Social Bookmarking News
Mixx is having technical issues today. I’ve never seen that before. With everything I try to bookmark I get an error message. Hmmm….
New bookmarking sites are popping up on the ME TLD. I’ve found two already and will likely find more before the end of the week. UPP.me is one site and Uan.me is another. What’s this mean? I don’t know, but you can bet it probably has something to do with a darned propagated myth. Or, maybe not.
July 25th, 2008 at 10:27 am
They launched the new site before it was ready. Well, that is an understatement really. AOL is worse than Microsoft when it comes to premature launch.
Propeller’s new system may very well work out to be as good as BlogCatalog.com once they work out the million or so bugs.
July 26th, 2008 at 5:46 am
Agree a thousand percent. The new propeller doesn’t have much of the ooomph it used to have.
Add to all the design changes the fact that they are no longer using direct linking urls to refer back to your website and the benefits go down even further.
By the way, thanks a million for mentioning UanMe. We launched UanMe the same day as the propeller redesign completely by accident. But we are hoping that some of the frustrated propeller community like our site and post their links.
UanMe welcomes all of the Propeller.com refugees!
August 1st, 2008 at 11:09 pm
[...] this week I blasted Propeller for its new look. It clearly was a step down. Today I’ve got another social bookmarking [...]