Amplify: Discover, Broadcast, and Discuss Clips of the Web

Amplify is a social networking site that makes it simple to discover new content, broadcast things you find to your social networks, and discuss these items with like-minded individuals. It’s like Ping.fm, but with a social network built in. Another service it’s very similar to is Posterous.

The way it works is that you clip pieces of web pages to your Amplog using their fancy bookmarklet. These clips are not only posted to your blog on Amplify, but also broadcasted across your social networks. Currently, Amplify supports: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Posterous, Plurk, Diigo, Delicious, and Clipmarks.

The Amplify team includes 3 Eric’s (Goldstein, Weitner, and Skiff), Derek Krzanowski, Dave Grossman, and Chris Parandian. Derek and the Eric’s are actually the brains behind Clipmarks, a service that was hot in ‘07 and still gets about 400k unique visitors each month. Clipmarks is actually quite similar to Amplify in that it was made to share and discuss snippets of the web. The obvious question is, why did they choose to create a new service so similar to the one they had already made. They explain in the Amplify FAQ:

Since Amplify was created by the team at Clipmarks, why was it created as a separate service instead of being part of Clipmarks.com?

• We really didn’t want to disturb the user experience or community on Clipmarks.com, but we wanted a way to better support Twitter and Facebook users as well as groups. After a lot of consideration, we decided that the best way to do this would be to create Amplify as a separate service from Clipmarks, but give people who want to participate on both an easy way to sync the two.

By taking this approach, current users of Clipmarks can choose to create an account on Amplify, hook it up with their current Clipmarks account, and it’s business as usual for them. The added benefit being that the things they share on their Amplog are made available to their community on Clipmarks, as well as Facebook, Twitter and everywhere else.

Besides the ability to broadcast your items, the other major difference between the two is that Amplify is not only a Firefox extension but works as a bookmarklet on all major browsers. Clipmarks only works for Firefox or IE and, with Chrome gaining market share, this may turn away a bunch of potential users.

As far as Amplify itself, while it’s not a completely and totally original idea, it does seem to have a less “bloggy” feel to it. Posterous is probably the reigning champ is this particular arena (sharing things to your own site while also broadcasting to other social networks). Amplify is different in that it’s more of a social network than a blog. The content is also separated by topic, which helps you find exactly what you want to look at.

Will Amplify steal users away from Posterous? That remains to be seen, but I’m definitely going to try it on for size.

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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