Snippee – Relevant News, Socially Networked
New aggregation is nothing new and neither is building your own Web portal to access your most-used stuff. What’s unusual is the ability to both aggregate a Web portal and integrate that with your social networking commentary.
Snippee.com is all about that. It allows you to not only easily access your favorite and most commonly-used news feeds (or any feed, for that matter), but it allows you to more easily share it with your social networks and integrate commentary between your friends to build and thread conversations.
Snippee gets its name from its basic function, which is “snipping” relevant news for you so you can see headlines and quick synopsis (usually the first few lines) before diving more deeply into the story. Similar to the way most RSS readers work.
Beyond that, though, it then allows you to tag content, build trends (through those tags), share the content with your networks (often automatically), and even share and build comment bases based on that content.
Since most savvy Internet users are often on more than one social network—whether they use one more heavily than another might vary—and since most users are interested in sharing with their networks, this kind of app is extremely useful. Beyond that, though, Snippee allows the savvy user to stay in contact and interactive with people no matter which social network they prefer.
That’s an important distinction right now, since some might be into Facebook while others might be massive Tweeps. It’s not often that someone is both. We only have so many hours in the day. If you’re active across two or three social networks, it’s sometimes hard to keep up—especially when much of your content sharing is pasted across all three. Integrating those is the current app phenomenon.
Snippee is a nice tool for doing that, though others with bigger names like FriendFeed and Digg may begin to cut into this quickly. There are a few things that Snippee does better than FriendFeed, like integrating with more networks, but FF is definitely better on commentary integration. Snippee is better than Digg on both counts, however.
While Snippee is definitely not the best way to do all of this, it’s one of the better ways to do it right now. Until someone figures out how to mash all these APIs together from different networks and integrate all of that into a good site (FriendFeed, for my money, is getting closer to doing this than anyone), though, apps like Snippee will continue to be useful steps in that direction.
Snippee is free to use and definitely worth trying. It will probably be a better option for some than it is for others, but most will find it at least useful.
