The coolness factor – is it for everyone?

Yesterday, Rafe Needleman at CNET took a look at eSnips and wrote a great review (thank you, Rafe.)  His headline was “eSnips: where the cool kids aren’t,” and his article backed up the headline by saying that “eSnips … appears to cater to the more restrained among us.” 

While his review was generally very positive, it got me thinking about his point about the “cool kids” going somewhere else to join the social web.  It is true that eSnips caters to a different audience.  We don’t only cater to them, but we actually have seen that our audience is truly different than the stereotypical kid on MySpace.  First, they are older.  They’re not only out of their teens, but many of them are in their 30s and 40s.  Second, they’re not interested in content-sharing in the MySpace vein.  Rafe hit this one spot on when he said that “eSnips … is not about laying bare your tortured soul, as much as it is a utility for collecting content and other online resources you find interesting.” 

So, it leaves me with the question of coolness.  Does a new Web 2.0 company need to be cool?  Will “being cool” help us reach our target audience?  And more importantly, as we’ve seen when the cool kids moved from Friendster to MySpace in the blink of an eye: will being cool help me keep my audience? 

In fact, I am pretty comfortable saying “no” to these questions.   I believe that we can’t all be cool, and while being cool is fun while it lasts, you’re never really sure what got you there in the first place and what will happen when it ends.  Also, the users who like and use eSnips really take advantage of the fact that they really don’t need to be as committed and as competitive as the MySpace crowd.  They’re fine in the comfortable community that we’ve created.

So many of our brainstorming sessions here at eSnips tend to focus on our positioning vis-à-vis the other social networks out there.  We tend to chase our tails for a while, and then ending up with the statement that eSnips is really MySpace for the rest of us. 

Thank you Rafe Needleman for spelling out something we have felt internally for a while.

Comments

[Max]

May I abuse of comments to post a question? I've read in your privacy policy the possibility of PRO accounts, so the future possibility of upgrading. Will this mean that the original 1GB space will be reduced or the upgrade will be for those willing much more space (for example?)

[YaelElish]

Max - thanks for asking. Our business model is to make money from advertising, not premium services or extra storage. The legalities are there to provide us with the flexibility to do so if we decide to in the future, but currently it's not part of our road map. On the contrary, more great features are being added (free of course).