Propeller Gets a Major Overhaul, But is It All Good?
Propeller, AOL's Digg clone, has been revamped in a major way as of Tuesday. The revamp had already been announced, but the magnitude of it surprised me. Not only have they dropped voting for an obscure "prop" functionality (prop a story up, get it?), where a story is ranked 1-10 based on a number of factors.
Our engineers have created a series of algorithms that measure a wide range of participation. For any given story, we factor in the number of votes (or “props”), page views, and comments inspired by the post. Stir in a few more variables, and you get a “Propeller Popularity Index” for the story (Fig A, below). The top-scoring stories make it to the front page – and of course those stories will keep changing, 24 hours a day.Honestly, Propeller, PPI is still going to mean "Producer Price Index" for most. At any rate, while some may say this is a divergence from Digg-like voting, we shouldn't forget that Digg doesn't just rely on votes, but has their own algorithm as well.
Longtime Propeller members will recall that voting used to be the key variable in the equation. More recently, we decided that it made more sense to rank stories on the basis of total participation, rather than focusing on exactly how many people pulled the virtual lever. The Propeller Popularity Index (yes, you may call it the PPI) is ultimately a measure of the community’s attention and enthusiasm.
Much like Yahoo! Buzz, top stories from Propeller will hit the front page at AOL News, in a sidebar titled "User-Submitted News, Powered by Propeller."Also added: Groups. You can create a group devoted to say, politics, and invite other users to it, or accept requests to it. Once a story is submitted to all of Propeller, you can also send it to groups (there's a Send to Groups link on the submission page, but it doesn't seem to work; only the Send to Groups link from the story itself seems to be working).
They also added a goofy-looking mascot (above).
One thing I don't like is the dearth of stories on the front page. With the new design, there's so much fluff, there's no room for news. I'm not sure what the number was previously, but I know it was a lot more than a mere 10 stories on the front page.
I also liked that banner of "Top Stories" across the top of the page; that's gone also, replaced by our new mascot encouraging us to submit content.
Also, once a story is submitted, you get a "Thanks" page, but have to click a link to see your story. That makes it harder to share a story. On the other hand, perhaps that's what they want, to prevent spamming. I'm also not sure the auto-dupe checker is working any longer.
It looks like any pending friend requests got zapped (I often have a ton every time I check and it's zero right now) as were any unread messages. I'm also not seeing alerts when a message comes in, as I used to, so I sure hope they tested this thing well. The last time they had a major upgrade there were a ton of hiccups.
Oh, and when I looked at my messages, groan. The new layout manages to show a title and half a line of text. So you have to open the message to read it - and the messages don't exactly open swiftly. Double-groan.
Personally, I liked the simpler look. On the other hand, this may prove more attractive to the masses, which is obviously how Propeller aims to increase traffic. Will it work? We'll see.
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10 comments:
Here's to hoping that the strange, new-look Propeller settles down and gains traction as its authors obviously intend.
Whatever the case, some of us will always look forward to TechnologyExpert's knowledgeable contributions as usual.
Nice post on this - I'm keeping an open mind for now. Doesn't look like it's possible to follow all our friends' activity, which I am sad to lose....but time will tell, right?
Hopefully it'll keep people like AlphaGnosis from manipulating the system with Spam.
The great thing about propeller was how easy it was to read the comments.
It now reads as if a couple of tech guys were turned lose to add bells and whistles, but forgot about the CUSTOMER.
This is an example of "CHANGE".
The creative way would have been to do a survey about what was liked and disliked. Then work on improvements a step at a time.
This comes across as a beta of a beta of a beta. Very sloppy work.
@klarissa
Reading comments on the old Propeller actually sucked. There would be replies to replies to replies of comments that kept indenting with each reply taking the comments to the extreme with single character width comments that read like.
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... and so on and so forth
Well, I tried to post this on the "new" propeller, but it was so excruciatingly frustrating to try to find whether it ever appeared in the thread that I repeat it here.
This "new" version of propeller is spectacularly BAD. So bad that I suggest propeller revert to the old version until this one is made sufficiently user friendly to be useful. This may well be a matter of survival for propeller (see below).
1. The visual design is frustrating and very inefficient. The exorbitant use of space is such that what I could scan quickly in the previous version now requires very slow passage down ladders of pages. Look at this page: the content I am interested in occupies about 60% of the page width and, in a long thread, 40% of the page is blank. Consequently, I must click through many more pages to see the same content . At present I cannot get anymore than the first 25 comments! Furthermore, there seems to be no way to skip to the end of the thread to see the most recent comments. I will NOT click through this thread 25 at a time to get to the most recent comments. Hence the chances are good that I will NOT participate in this thread or any other thread where the most recent content is not easily accessible. Deadly design failure.
2. The usage of "groups" seems to be mainly a gimmick - that I would regard as counterproductive as presently structured. For example, one of the most frequented previous categories was politics. This apparently can now fragment into hundreds of different groups - I will not take the trouble to search through all of these even once to see if any are interesting. I will most certainly not search through them daily to see if there is something interesting in any of them. On top of that, I would prefer to see ALL the commments from propeller users, including those from occasional users that may not take the trouble to join groups. I would urge propeller to drastically downgrade "groups" so that fragmentation does not choke the site off. If groups becomes a method for "group block voting" certain stories to the front page, you can forget about my further participation here.
3. For a long time, slow response to user input has been a frustrating aspect of propeller. This version makes it worse. For example, instead of a single page to submit a story, I must now click through several descending pages. With slow responses, this becomes so painful that I will (after several years) abandon submitting stories. There are many other places where the presentation of content now requires much longer ladders of pages than previously.
4. The excruciatingly poor usage of space continues throughout. Take my own pages. Once again only 60% of the page width is used for the content I am interested in and large parts of the pages are blank. The presentation of information content in the used space is also poor. To scan through my "fans" I must page down through innumerable ladders when the entire information could have been repesented on about 1 page.
5. Numerous functions do not seem to work at all.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that I consider this version a drastic DOWNGRADE of propeller from the point of view of usability. Perhaps even as a matter of survival for propeller, I suggest that the old version be restored until such time as this version has undergone a major revision to get it up to acceptable levels of user friendliness.
anthony - a good comment about the columns.
However, that is exactly what I meant about improving, not changing.
You , and we, didn't like that part - so the whole interface doesn't have to be changed to come up with a clever way to fix that problem.
One way would be to indent it only 2 spaces. When it gets quite narrow a message could pop up that says to start a new subject.
Klarissa, youre right.
Revamping a site so you dont have to read a vertical posting is fine, but eliminating all of the features that the users want is the epitome of poor customer service.
I dont know it its worth it to attempt to navigate this sorry new site.
I think people are usually adverse to change, but I agree that the new Propeller seems crap compared to the old one.
It looks like they are trying to capture the 3 - 6 demographic with the megasized text, goofy cartoon mascot and bright colours.
However, I'm trying to keep an open mind and keep posting as usual. But I think if someone at least explained the rationale behind all the changes, everyone would be less outraged!!
Do you have any ideas on how to promote stories on the new Propeller? Submitting to groups doesn't work well...
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