There is no dearth of content online on any topic you look for. From plain text pages, we have moved into era that enriches the information with pictures and videos. Saving those pictures & videos and sharing them in a streamlined manner is tricky.

We cannot save pictures & videos and upload as email attachments. Size limitations and the
lack of dynamic interactions is a huge problem with email attachments. Snipi solves the problem with a web app that brings full duplex sharing & collaboration when it comes to images & videos online.

Overview

With Snipi it is easy for just about anyone to collect, organize, share and collaborate on their interests by grabbing content from across the web. Snipi let us capture products, photos and videos off of any webpage, Organize our online finds and then share & collaborate on the collects with friends & family.

Overview

Sign up page has a couple of issues. First being the mandatory requirement for a ZIP code, which I am not sure how useful its going to be for a bookmarking service. Second, the CAPTCHA images do not load perfectly and often you will have use the Refresh link to force the system to show a new image. Snipi is a free to use service.

Setting Up

After the sign up that does not require email verification, we are taken to a page that offers us tools that can help us start collecting our online interests.

Get Tools Page

We can start using Snipi in two ways – either by using a Firefox toolbar or a bookmarklet that works on all popular web browsers. I chose to go with the Firefox toolbar for this review.

Snipi Tools

The toolbar is a tad bit large but does look good and blends well with the browser window.

Firefox Toolbar

Collecting Snippets

Putting Snipi to use extremely simple. Once you find a product, photo or video that interest you, all you have to do is drag and drop it into the toolbar. It’s that simple.

Sniping an Image

Sniping a video

You can a add title, description and tags to the item you just snipped for indexing. Items snipped can be organized under various lists to keep things relevant. These lists can be made private or can be shared publicly.

From the web dashboard you can discover poplar videos, pictures and products that have been shared publicly by other users. While lists can be created from the toolbar, streams can be created from the dashboard.

Collaborating with Streams

A Snipi stream is a collection of the products, photos &  videos that you capture from any web page. Streams can be about any topic and anyone can create one from the dashboard. It looks like a threaded conversation in a forum.

Streams

Once a Stream is created, others can contribute their snips that are relevant to the conversation. With Snipi’s Streams, it just is so easy for a group of people to collaborate on any topic, dragging & dropping content from across the globe.

Web Dashboard

Snipi lets you to be in total control of a stream.  You can choose to allow who can follow and contribute to the conversation.

Final Thoughts

Snipi is a neat little app to help you solve the problem of collecting, organizing, sharing and collaborating multimedia content online. The web app is useful for everyone and for students in particular this could be an online scrapbook for a team assignment.

Snipi does what it is intended to do and except for installing a toolbar, I could not find any issues with the web app. And therein lies the compliment.