Checking Out eSnips

Israeli startup eSnips relaunched today with a new look and substantial feature upgrades. I did not have a chance to meet with eSnips during my recent trip to Israel, but CEO Yael Elish and VP Marketing Efrat Moshkoviz visited silicon valley a couple of weeks ago and i was able to get a demo.

It’s hard to categorize eSnips. We looked at it as part of our review of online storage providers – and although eSnips does provide 1 GB of free storage for users, they clearly are up to something else as well.

The core idea is to allow users to upload media files of any type – photos, videos, office documents, whatever – tag them, and either keep them private, share with other or make them public. But eSnips is also allowing bookmarking of web content, from a whole page to a line or paragraph. Others can comment on each piece of media or content as well, and rate a user created page. RSS feeds are available for everything.

Given the social aspects of the service, eSnips is really a content-centric social network.

eSnips also offers a client uploader for file transfers, and a toolbar for easier bookmarking. Both only work on Windows machines at this time, however.

I like combining media and other files with bookmarked content, and although I’m not sure if eSnips in its current form will stand out enough from the crowd, I do think they are on to something interesting. If virality kicks in from sharing, they could have a winner. eSnips is free, and they will charge for storage above 1 GB and other services.