Techno-fille

eSnips looks nice on Alexa today

Up from 115 to 365:

Pete Cashmore wrote about eSnips in Mashable.

Pete Cashmore wrote about eSnips in Mashable.  He referred to Mike Arrington's review of eSnips, but he had some reservations. 

Of course I 'm  very happy that Pete wrote about us,  but I disagree with some of the points he makes, not just as they relate to eSnips, but generally to the industry and to other services.
For those with  the  patience  to track the argument, I 'm writing here why I think broad services have more potential than specialized (though both are huge), and why mashups  aren't appropriate for everything.

Here are my points:

1. There is a market for specialized services AND a market for  sites  that provide a  wide range of services  (and yes, I agree that the case is often that each of these services may , taken separately,  be less professional than the ones offered by the specialized service).  Where I disagree with Pete is  the question of  which  one  has a broader market and user need. I belive that the specialized one has a smaller market, and the one providing a broader range of service  has a  far bigger  market .

As much as we don't want to admit it , convenience dominates our lives.  That is, for most of what I want to do, I'll prefer the most convenient service that requires the least hassle. People won't go the extra mile and inconvenience to go  to  the specialized place  unless they have an all-consuming hobby or specialization.  Examples: 

Take shops. You can go to a shop that specializes in running equipment, or you could go to a sports shop that may have less professional experience but provides you with a broader range of products so you will not have to go from one store to the other. A small percentage of us,  the  professional runners,  may never step into a  super sports shop, but for the rest of us, it's the most convenient way to shop when you find all the things you need in one place rather than  having to drive from one  store to the other. When you look for something that you know is specialized, you go to the specialized store.

Google is another good example.  There are tons of  specialized  search engines, that would get you better, more specific information but most people, including me, prefer to go to the  one  place where they would get most of what they want.

Third example is Myspace. A big appeal in  MySpace , and one of the reasons people left  Friendster and moved to Myspace, is the ability to share a broader range of things. dana boyd  in her fascinating essay 'Friendster  Lost  Steam.  Is MySpace just a fad?' points out that one of the reasons people left Friendster and moved to Myspace was that Myspace enabled them to share a much broader range of things:  Here's the quote:   

"The limited amount of things people could share made this difficult on Friendster; people mostly shared profiles as cultural currency and testimonials did allow for some marking of turf and social hierarchy. Yet, on MySpace, there are a bazillion things to find deep in the nooks, allowing lots and lots to be shared. Allowing media in comments and the ability to share video/pictures via profiles enhanced this. have one place."

2)  The context for everything that I worte above is ,  of course :  what is  the reason I go to a site. If I want to  be entertained, or if I filmed a totally funny video ,   then I would probably go to Youtube. But when I want to share stuff on an onging basis, I prefer the convenience of one  place , where everything is made convenient for me, and people come to me.

In this sense, you could say, well email is probably what eSnips competes against, and I think there's a point to address here too.

Regarding mashups,  don't misunderstand me, I'm all for mashups, but  they're sometimes appropriate and sometimes not.  Also, if you take it to the extreme you create companies that suddenly become back-end service providers to other companies and have no choice other than to charge for their services. If I  accept Pete's theory of how things should be, then the more services integrate Flickr, the less Flickr can create a community and value of  its  own . Taking this to the extreme, it will become a back end with high storage and bandwidth costs and no way to make a living other than to charge for its service.

The more you want to provide a consistent user experience the more you will use another company's API, and as you do that, you may even get to a point where this other company is totally transparent to the end user. For example, if you want to avoid asking your users to have an account in Flickr too, you use API's to create an account for them;   the more you do that ,  the more users become totally unaware of their existence.  Opening up APIs is something the giants can afford. Small companies doing that have to either rely on charging for being a backend or disappearing. 

I love these discussions, but I think  that eventually we're all surprised by the things that do end up working, and we 're all  much better at explaining in retrospect why some things worked and others didn't , than we are at predicting it in advance.  That's not to say that I don't participate in this sport.  Perhaps I'm totally over opinionated about it.

The after launch

We've done little in the way of public relations but from the number of registrations, the new version is clearly generating interest. Mike Arrington wrote about eSnips a few hours ago:

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

He also wtore: "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."

I also think (how surprising...) that we are on to something interesting.  Social Networks and User Contributed Content are clearly a very powerful trends that are in their infancy.

It's true these spaces seem crowded, but they are not as cluttered as they seem. There are two types of social networks. People–centric and Content-centric.  People-centric networks like MySpace and Tagworld did manage to provide a home to their users, ONE place where they share all their stuff and everything is about them. That's not the case for Content-centric networks, in which the user experience is totally scattered -   this space is still open, and this is where eSnis wants to be. Here's what we think is missing and will focus on at eSnips:

-  Place the user and their content in the center of the experience
-  Not limit what sort of content (photos, movies, mp3s, etc.) users can share
-  Let users manage as many personal or shared 'spaces' as they want -  ALL in ONE place
-  Give users control and flexibility over WHAT they share, WHO they share it with and HOW.
-  Better connect to  desktop  – that's where users manage their content and spend most of their computer time.

More on the difference between Social, content-centric networks and Social, people-centric networks to come soon. btw - please feel free to report typos, there are probably lots of them...

The social eSnips - the impact on our metrics

The social version of eSnips went live tonight. It’s fascinating to watch in real time what happens when a service that already has a substantial user base and traffic suddenly becomes social.  It's like a light turning on. One day it’s just your stuff and the people you share it with, the next day it’s suddenly all interconnected, and you discover other related content by other people, and  interesting people  who may have been there right next to you  all along , but you had no way of knowing.      We have our own data,  of course,  but even looking at Alexa, page views per visitor for example went up almost 300%,  overnight. Someone ought to do a case study on this phenomenon.

I’ll write more later about the launch, I just wanted to share this amazing experience. Don't forget to visit eSnippers' den for more news and updates.   

The new version of eSnips will launch on Tuesday the 21st

We’ve been working on this version for several months and can’t wait to finally launch it.

The first version of eSnips focused on providing our users with freedom, flexibility and control over WHAT they can share, WHO they share it with, and HOW they share it.

In the upcoming version eSnips will become social.

We made the first version available as soon as we could (Sept. 2005) with zero promotion and an almost non existing hosting infrastructure, and were astonished with the fast,  purely viral growth it received. That helped us tremendously raising a seed investment from a reputable VC, and allowed us to focus on the next version and to build a hosting infrastructure than can really scale.

We expect this change to have a major impact on eSnips' metrics. So if the current growth was good we are anxious to see what will happen now.   

Of course there is a downside to everything: This major upgrade requires a significant change in our database and significant downtime can’t be avoided. We’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Check out Efrat's eSnippers den blog for detailed and more updated information about the launch.

Service Transition & Upgrade Complete!

Many significant milestones were accomplished during the past two months by our small team. But the transitioning of a data center to the new hosting facility is the one project for which I can’t stress enough how great it feels to be over with.

So I am pleased to announce that on March 1, we successfully completed the transition of our data from our old LA based hosting provider, where we ran the service on a managed hosting basis,  to our new  NY based hosting facility where we now co-locate the service.  Now that we own and manage the equipment and network we have control over the quality of service we provide and things look much better. We’re already received emails from users telling us the service is significantly faster than it previously was, and we’re really glad about that.
The other comforting aspect is that we purchased equipment that should accommodate the massive growth we are projecting for this year. 

This is an excellent opportunity to thank Shlomi Zohar our expert networking consultant and  Noam Guy (from our development team) who successfully planned, managed and co-ordinated the entire project. I have no idea how we would have managed this project without you!  And thank you Gemini  we probably wouldn’t have been able to do it without you too…

Google's online storage plans

Interesting post and discussion going on in Techcrunch about this topic.  It's not surprising. It fits perfectly well into their strategy against Microsoft. I couldn't find information about their time table, but because it's such a major undertaking I would assume it will not be during 2006.  In any case, eSnips is not an online storage company, so it may impact eSnips in the same manner it may impact other web 2.0 service that offer content sharing or publishing. Since the value in eSnips and in most  web 2.0 services goes far beyond access to files or content, I don't think that the impact will be significant, at least not in the first phase.  Services offering pure storage may be  directly impacted. I personally don't believe there is a sustainable and scalable model for pure online storage of files. It's  a strategic move that only giant strategic players like  Google and Yahoo can get into, sustain the costs associated and monetize indirectly .  So as far as we are concerned, Google is very welcome to take on this challenge.

Notes from IBDN's 'Under the radar' conference

We came all the way from Israel to SF, to attend the IBDN 'Under the radar' conference organized by Debbie Landa and Alison Murdock in. But it was worth it. We'll definitely attend the next relevant IBDN event. They did a great job at brining together to a relatively small event very  a impressive audience and panelists. The 32 companies that presented received useful comments to go back home with - no doubt.  Some of them, specifically  post Series A companies like Riya seemed like they no longer need to pay much attention to the comments they were getting…they'll probably be more attentive when they get closer to raising their next round.

It was great to chat with Renee Blodgett, Dave Winer, Stowe Boyd and Michael Arrington on things totally not related to Web 2.0.   Renee Blodgett or David Winer took this picture of me and Efrat listening to Michael Arrington interviewing Ross Levinsohn, President, Fox Interactive Media about their acquisition of MySpace.