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TheDomains.com

Google Names Its News Reader To Compete With Flipboard & AOL “Propeller”: Problem is AOL Owns Propeller.com & Has its Own NewsReader Called Editions.com

September 17, 2011 by Michael Berkens

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!

Filed Under: Domains, Publicly Traded Domain Co

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

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Comments

  1. HornJacker says

    September 17, 2011 at 10:11 am

    Domains are beginning to take a back-seat to apps. This story is proof – Google is too full of talent to make rookie mistakes.

  2. TheBigLieSociety says

    September 17, 2011 at 10:25 am

    “Their choice of using a domain name owned by a competitor”
    ===

    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”

  3. [] [] [] [] [] click [] [] [] [] [] says

    September 17, 2011 at 10:25 am

    AOL Propeller is no longer active … aolnews.com/goodbye-propeller/

    so, AOL may sell Propeller.com to Google for … $50 million? 🙂

  4. Captain ZOOM says

    September 17, 2011 at 10:36 am

    +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

  5. ojohn says

    September 17, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    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 🙂

    –

  6. Owen frager says

    September 17, 2011 at 11:14 pm

    Paper.li is the best personal news app and the next 100 million ipo

  7. re_format says

    September 18, 2011 at 1:33 am

    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.

  8. Adam S says

    September 18, 2011 at 1:48 am

    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

  9. LindaM says

    September 18, 2011 at 1:35 pm

    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

  10. re_format says

    September 18, 2011 at 7:39 pm

    @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.

  11. Google is a FRAUD says

    September 18, 2011 at 8:19 pm

    Blackmailer in chief to AOL: We’ll penalize your sites even more unless you give us propeller.com.

  12. ojohn says

    September 19, 2011 at 12:49 am

    @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)

    –

  13. Adam S says

    September 19, 2011 at 1:21 am

    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.

  14. [] ALT PAD [] not all tablets will be sold by Apple [] says

    September 19, 2011 at 3:38 am

    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/


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