eSnips bumps storage, upgrades music sharing

eSnips, the social networking and content-hosting service, is quintupling the storage on users accounts to 5GB. The company is also adding new music-sharing features that let users create embeddable music widgets and playlists for use on eSnips user pages, blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites like MySpace. The service ties into the eSnips marketplace, which lets you buy and sell user-generated content like photos and music.

We covered eSnips last year and noted its similarity to social bookmarking site Del.icio.us mixed with content hosting like you'd find on social networking sites. Since then, eSnips claims to have grown to a user base of more than 1.5 million registered users, which is more than Del.icio.us in less than a third of the time. The company also added 'Micro-Portals' in November, which are themed community pages that aggregate some of the site's most popular content. Photography, for example, gets its own Micro-Portal featuring popular or interesting photos from eSnips users. The same goes for poetry, painting, and now music.

The embeddable music widgets make eSnips content easier to share. It's a useful utility for existing eSnips users, but unlikely to draw new users to the service; there are a lot of music-playing widgets available. eSnips does get a thumbs up for its combination of music features: You can store, share, and sell music all from one interface.

Completely unrelated (but very interesting) is the eSnips toolbar. I usually don't get excited about toolbars, but this one has a neat feature that lets you take really slick looking screenshots of whatever Web page you're looking at, to share with others. Other social bookmarking tools rely on users or the site's feed to fill in aspects like the title and the description; but with the toolbar, you can just take a shot of it and post it to your eSnips profile, without having to log in or even touch your keyboard.

I've embedded one of the eSnips music widgets below, although as a warning I didn't pick out the music.

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