Skmmr Lets You Share Content With Close Friends

Patrick Skelley October 26, 2011 Tweet

Do you lean on certain groups of friends to share and recommend books, websites or videos?  Chances are you are sharing via email.  Email takes care of one-to-one sharing; Facebook, Twitter and StumbleUpon cover one-to-many sharing, but there are few services that cater exclusively to small group sharing.  Skmmr offers a new way to share content with groups of friends.

Skmmr allows users to create circles, limited to 8 members, around a common interest or hobby.  The idea, according to Skmmer co-creator Zack Shapiro, is that Skmmr allows you to share content with only the people to whom you believe it will best resonate, thus initiating a conversation, instead of broadcasting to a roomful of people.  As you’re browsing the web and come across something that may be interesting to your Skmmr circle, you hit the bookmarklet and choose the appropriate group.

Shapiro had this to say:

We wanted to limit the group size to eight for a few reasons. First, psychological research has shown that you typically have 2-8 good friends in any segment of your friends circle. These might be the people that you turn to most about Design, for example. Second, we wanted to keep the signal to noise ratio very high and we figured that by keeping groups small, we could do that.

Skmmr’s competition include Clipboard, which gives you a simple bookmarklet for your browser that will let you select a full element of a web page to save and share with whomever you like.  There’s also Google+; however sharing and setting up circles can seem a bit daunting.  Skmmr seeks to be the clear signal among a more noisy Google+.

What remains to be seen is whether people will use Skmmr in place of something as ubiquitous as email.  The challenge will be, as it is for any startup, to get people to sign up and use Skmmr in groups.  It’s not as simple as “if you build it they will come” but rather “If they come, I will too.”

Skmmr presented at Tech Cocktail’s Boulder mixer this past Monday night and previewed it to the world for the first time. Skmmr will be launching into beta later this week so sign up if you are interested in getting a chance to take a look at it early.