“Submit. Vote. Share.”
These three words serve as the de facto motto for snap.fm, a new social bookmarking service dedicated to music news and founded by 2006 Boston University alumnus Devin Poehlman and Arizona State University student Jesse Gill.
For the unacquainted, social bookmarking is an open-ended, user-driven service that allows members to submit, read, search and rank “bookmarks” of — or links to — other websites. These links are coupled with a brief summary.
Social bookmarking is thought to be changing the way people engage with the Internet. Services such as Digg.com and del.icio.us promote non-hierarchical communities and complete editorial control amongst their users.
The main page of snap.fm greets the visitor with a list of current, newly-submitted stories. Headlines range from “Punk Played on the Radio” to “Kanye West, Amy Winehouse lead Grammy Nominations.”
From there, users can “vote for” or “kill” a story — give it positive or negative rating, comment on it or even share it amongst friends.
The website’s user-based functionality closely resembles that of Digg, a wildly popular social bookmarking website dedicated popular internet news. Poehlman, however, sees this similarity as neither coincidental nor plagiaristic.
“We’re going to be branded a Digg clone, but that’s because the genre is so new,” Poehlman said. “As the genre begins to grow, I think [that will happen] less and less. We look a lot like Digg right now, and I think that’s the product of not having a lot of money.”
In fact, snap.fm’s genesis sprang from what the co-founders saw as a flaw of Digg.
“We’d been following Digg for over a year now and they came out with a big update,” Poehlman said. “They involved a music section and we were really excited to find new stuff. But it wound up not being that great . . . what we’re doing is what they ended up not doing.”
Poehlman said he and co-founder Gill work closely with the website’s users, 100 of whom log roughly 300 unique visits per month.
“We have a lot of contact, especially with the core users, so we get a lot of feedback from them,” Poehlman explained. “So we’re talking to people who use it; asking them what can be done to make it work better. We’ve gotten great feedback from people who say, ‘This sucks’ or, ‘This doesn’t work,’ but its going to be interesting to get outside feedback.”
“We take a lot of that [feedback] into consideration,” Gill added. “The first thing about a social site is that you want your users to be happy with it.”
It is this sort of feedback that assists in snap.fm’s launch of a unique series of new features, which include a Facebook-like customizable newsfeed, as well as a feature that lets the user “push” a song to another member’s playlist in order to encourage them to listen to it. Likewise, if a user hears a song he likes on another playlist, he can “pull” it onto his own.
“You can track the linear movement of a song through friendships,” Poehlman said.
However, the major purpose of snap.fm is to provide a single social environment for self-proclaimed “music junkies” to get all the news about their favorite subject.
“Half the stuff that’s on there right now is stuff I haven’t seen on my own,” Gill said, “which is great since we still have such a small user base.”
Poehlman and Gill said they hope that, as they try to gain publicity and build a larger user base, people will continue to follow their interests sparked by snap.fm.
“It was, at first, just our friends,” Gill said, “but now it’s friends of friends. Surprisingly there are a few users on the site that we don’t even know.
“I think our core audience — kids between 16 and 35 — go to at least a couple shows a year and are the kind of people that keep up on band news,” he continued. “They’re the kind of people that are into sharing music. I think just having that other audience will help spread the word.”