Hands-On With The Newly Revamped Snip.it: Where Pinterest Meets News, And So Much More

They really are doing face-lifts younger and younger these days.

It was just eight months ago in October 2011 when we first met Snip.it, a San Francisco-based startup that has created a web application for people to “snip,” collect, and comment on, and share their favorite articles from all over the web. But for Snip.it, it’s already high time for a makeover: Today the company is unveiling a top-to-bottom rebuild of its service with a faster, revamped user experience and a heaping handful of new features.

The New New Snip.it

So this week we were pleased to have the opportunity to interview Ramy Adeeb, Snip.it’s founder and CEO. Adeeb came by TechCrunch TV to give us a hands-on look at the brand new Snip.it and give us the rundown on his company. It still has that super trendy Pinterest-like pinboard layout it’s famously had since launch, but it actually has so much going on behind that interface that you forget the comparison as soon as you dive in.

Watch the video embedded above to see Adeeb show off the Snip.it application’s snappy new Backbone.js-powered page load structure, its truly addictive “stats” feature that shows you exactly how many people have viewed your collections and shared articles, 100+ brand new collection topic categories, custom page personalization features, as well as Snip.it’s new mobile-friendly web presence.

We also got Adeeb to fill us in on where he sees Snip.it fitting in to the current landscape of other news sharing sites — from major social networks where people already share so much news such as Facebook and Twitter, to more focused content-reading and sharing plays such as Trap.it, Prismatic, and Wavii.

The Nuts And Bolts, From RSS To Revenue

I also want to mention that in our off-camera interview, Adeeb answered a couple more in-depth questions about the nuts and bolts of where Snip.it could go in the future. Syndicating Snip.it content to RSS feeds is definitely on the near-term horizon, he said, which certainly satisfies the stickler in me — so much of the news reading and sharing we take for granted today would not be possible without those open standards, so I think it’s especially great when today’s slick new apps feed back into that system.

Snip.it is not currently making any money, but it does not plan to do so by offering premium paid features (I pointed out that the new version was already giving analytics away for free, a perk for which many social sharing apps opt to charge.) Rather, Snip.it plans to make money by putting clearly demarcated ads into shared news collections. The company has 10 full-time employees, and Adeeb has not yet disclosed the total amount of funding he raised in the “healthy” seed round for Snip.it from Khosla Ventures, True Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and SV Angel.

A Promising New Look At News Content

Snip.it is definitely aiming at a problem that a number of other applications are looking to solve, but I really like its style and Adeebs general vision. Since Google Reader turned off its social sharing features this past fall (as a big user of the service I took it hard, pour one out for my old homie, seriously) I’ve been on the hunt for a new place to share the various stuff I read on the web with my friends and acquaintances. I still need to take some time to really test it out on my own, but the new Snip.it could very well turn out to be that place.