Sazell Lets You "Snap The Web"

sazellSazell, launched in private beta today, is a social media site that lets you take a snapshot of any website and puts it in a Flash widget that you can embed on any site. A snapshot consists of the image chosen for the page, and highlighted or inputted text.

When “snapping” a page, the user first highlights the text they want to include in their snapshot, and then clicks the Sazell bookmarklet. The user is then taken to a page where they can add tags to their snapshot. After submitting, users are taken to a page for their snapshot where other users can rate, comment, share or favorite your snapshot. Users can browse other users’ pages and subscribe to them via RSS. All snapshots are indexed and the ones with the most views are listed on the Popular page and recent “snapped” pages are listed on the Upcoming page. Snapshots can be embedded individually on a website with their Flash widget, or a user can embed their recent snapshots, or the most popular snapshots from the entire site.

Update: Below is an image of what the widget looks like (we had to disable it because it was messing up the TechCrunch site on IE browsers, but you can play with it here):

Essentially a social bookmarking site, Sazell is entering a very competitive marketplace. Digg and Reddit are direct competition, seeing as how they both offer very similar widgets. Although, it’s more like Youtube for websites than it is a social bookmarking site. It measures popularity by views, not by votes or ranking. And the snapshots themselves are simply clips of images and text without any additional commentary by the person who creates them. Once embedded on a page, they are pretty static. The text is not clickable, and you need to select “view more details” to get the link of the original Website being excerpted.