The new groups feature on Propeller.com is starting to get fun. The team is still adding functionality to it, such as RSS, but its already interesting. The power to join a group of like minded people in your favorite niche topic, and then being able to share your thoughts on it… its the best of Usenet and Forums IMO.
On Propeller you can only create one group, so make it a good one. I believe I have: Battlestar Galactica.
Wil Wheaton is running the Geeks group. The conversation “I am a geek because…” spilled out into its own story.
My favorite response so far, FTC, is from Shoei-Mike:
I’m a geek becasuse:
(0) I’m not starting this list at 1.
(1) My wife wrote this about me.
(10) When I tried really hard to force past my bias against sport, I came up with this.
(11) I converted the message base from my old BBS to HTML pages and put it online.
(100) I found my way here by reading WWdN.
‘Nuff said.
tdrapeau Propeller Conversations, Geek, Groups, Propeller
A project I’ve been working on for some time has finally launched: an upgrade to the social news site called Propeller.com (Official blog post). I don’t normally write about work on my personal blog just because I’m already writing about it on corporate blogs and the like, and also because I like my blog to be a relaxing place to visit, with family pictures and all.
I’m proud of the effort my team put in and the final achievement. The site didn’t get very positive reviews from the tech blogs, and the existing community is still feeling it out. Social news is still a growing concept – I like its potential, where someone brings to light a story/meme/viral video and the community can share it. The mainstream news we get is OK, you can get that anywhere. The spam I hate. Really.
Social news sites are also victim to the fire hose effect, where the filtering mechanisms are too young/naive to really just show me what I want to see. Some community sites are starting to experiment with personalized news, but I don’t think that’s the whole solution. I want stuff you know I’ll like, but I also want good stuff I didn’t know I like – a tough task, but a noble one. BTW – lifestreaming services, news aggregators, RSS clients – you don’t do it right either. Trust me, I use all of you.
Time will tell whether or not we can make the right tweaks to the site to gain more mass traction. For now, though, I’m happy we got the upgrade out there. Trey, Blaine, George, Mike, Travis, Richard, James, Ryan, Alexia, Dakota, Helene – thanks. You guys rock.
tdrapeau Technology Propeller, social news
I’ll get back to my experiences from this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival later, but for now: My engineering team was working hard during the festival, and at one random point, Derek was taking pictures and took this one:
Take a look at how it compares to another famous picture:
The similarities were so weird that we agreed not to talk about them until people were home safe. I’m not sure what these similarities mean…
tdrapeau Funny Last Supper, Propeller, SXSW, Weird
