Sazell Ups Its Game, But Still Falls Short

By Chelsi Nakano | Published Oct 10, 2008

Sazell releases 2.0 platform

Last July, it was all bad in Sazell town, when they released the beta version of their platform, which is used to take and share snap-shots of the Web. In addition to having a highly-unattractive website, their logo was an obvious rip-off of the almighty Google — probably, one of the last logos you want to copy.

Recently, Sazell revealed their new site along with a ton of improvements to their platform that we hope will surely rectify the previous abomination.

Snap It, Snap It Good

Sazell 2.0 allows you to highlight whatever you want on the web and “snap it” using a Google Toolbar plug-in or bookmarklet. “Snapping” is, essentially, making a virtual and sharable memory of Web content that you enjoy. The snapshots are turned into viral widgets, meant to be embedded on your blog, personal website, profiles, etc.

Some of Sazell’s the new features include:

AutoSnap: A tool for website owners, publishers and bloggers. AutoSnap adds features to your content by creating snapshots automatically.
Multiple image uploads
Tracking features for embedded snapshots
Recommendations for engines to suggest similar snapshots
Support for content media types including text, video, audio, image, blog, documents and maps

Social Network Junkies Roll Their Eyes

In spite of Sazell’s snappy- (ha)-looking Web site, logo and vast improvements in functionality, consumer feedback since release generally consists of: “Dude, didn’t Facebook already cover this?” Which is true, Facebook did already cover it. And so did Tumblr. And Diigo. And SimplyBox. Among others, we’re sure.

Oh, Snap!

In the age when the Web is so interactive you can almost touch it, it’s not surprising that the Google generation is almost always less than impressed by new platforms that do anything less than Google can.

This isn’t to say that we don’t think what Sazell has got going on is kind of cool, but there doesn’t seem to be anything it particular as of yet that really makes it stand out or apart from the countless other platforms that already enable similar, if not the exact same, functions.

And with all of those options circulating the Internet and crowding our browsers, how will we ever manage to find room for another? For now, Sazell's size-up is just a platform that took the main idea behind their raison d’etre (copying in this case) a little too far.