According to various reports yesterday here and here, Google is working on launching a social and news reader app to compete with the very popular Flipboard App as well as Facebook, and is going to call it Propeller.
AOL is the owner of Propeller.com
AOL also has its own similar App already that competes with the leader Flipboard.
The name of AOL apps is Editions by AOL
Editions.com is owned by AOL, which unlike Google seems to understand that when you name an App it’s pretty important to own the domain as well.
Matter of fact, Editions.com serves only to promote the app and provide a download link to the App Store.
Flipboard owns Flipboard.com and that domain serves as a site to promote the App as well.
Flipboard and products like it including Editions and News.Me, are a personalized news reader that allow you to pick topics and/or publications from which you want to read stories and are hugely popular.
This is not just another Google product Mashable says “Propeller could be the news-reading app of the year”
Another source who got a glance of the product, says that Google’s product is “mind-blowing good”
Their choice of using a domain name owned by a competitor;
Mind-Blowingly Bad
FAIL!
Domains are beginning to take a back-seat to apps. This story is proof – Google is too full of talent to make rookie mistakes.
“Their choice of using a domain name owned by a competitor”
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What does a domain name have to do with a major software platform ?
Domain names are ** so last century ** even TLDs – why do you think ICANN is letting people in the game ? the show is over…
“Domains are beginning to take a back-seat to apps”
AOL Propeller is no longer active … aolnews.com/goodbye-propeller/
so, AOL may sell Propeller.com to Google for … $50 million? 🙂
+1
“Domains are beginning to take a back-seat to apps”
+1
Were you around when we bought… ??
ZOOM://
did you see Google has CHROME://
http:// is out-dated
We have seen a trend as far as super famous brands not wanting to be known by a separate domain for each one of their services, the thing is that once you are at the level of google extra domains will only dilute your brand unless off course you get .google 🙂
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Paper.li is the best personal news app and the next 100 million ipo
all languages (with arguably a couple of obscure exceptions) have numbers as part of their set of symbols. number systems are almost universal across all cultures. numbers are unambiguous. their meaning does not change. numbers cannot be claimed as intellectual property. they cannot be trademarked.
names lack these important qualities. they are a moving target.
good luck.
ojohn . . . What trend you talking about ?
google owns and has launched boutiques.com and disco.com most recently not to mention their other core services like gmail.com, adsense.com and adwords.com all use their respective .coms . The simplicity of the google.com interface means they don’t give up a lot of space to promote new products/services on the main site (unlike sites like yahoo) . So their MO is to name something and get the .com
Numbers are claimed as intellectual property all the time. Discover the next biggest prime number and companies will pay millions of dollars to acquire such intellectual property for use in their encryption algorithms. I think some of them (RSA?) have a standing $1m bounty for previously undiscovered ‘next largest’ primes.
Even something like a music track or movie file is just a really really long base2 number starting with 1 or 0.
Smaller numbers are also claimed and their usage legally restricted like 118118, 888, 747, 911 etc
@lindam: ask your lawyer if you can trademark your telephone number. n.b.: the number, not its representation in another form (which form is open to interpetation), such as letters.
yes, there’s bogus algorithm patents that would never withstand challenge. yes, they can be still used to intimidate competitors.
maybe you might also ask your lawyer if you can obtain rights to other unambiguous numerical representations, e.g. base2, of your telephone number. (borrowing from your music/movie file example).
good luck.
Blackmailer in chief to AOL: We’ll penalize your sites even more unless you give us propeller.com.
@Adam S
Those domains were put in to use a long time ago, but recently it seems that a lot of super brands are launching products and services without first securing the corresponding .com , so perhaps their strategy has changed more towards promoting their main brand over anything else which in the near future their main brand will most likely be their .brand (just my opinion)
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Disco.com was launched this spring (mike covered it) and boutiques.com in the fall last year
If you have any doubt about the trends in companies acquiring domains go read fusible.com . That’s pretty much all the guy writes about.
why, Google, still doesn’t open Google+ to everybody?
“Is Google’s CEO nonplussed by Google+?”
news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20107787-71/is-googles-ceo-nonplussed-by-google/