Here's the code we use to run the snippets system at foursquare:

https://github.com/kushal/snippets

This is awesome. As an ex-Googler at a startup, I've been wanting to re-implement OSS snippets for a while now. Checking it out!

You may want to look into iDoneThis: https://idonethis.com/

Disclaimer: I'm friends with the founders.

When you have 5 employees, maybe. If they are good at being really condensed and writing clearly.

When you have 20? 100? 1000? The number of snippets one has to read goes up linearly as the company expands for each employee. That means that waste goes up geometrically for the entire company.

And forcing each employee to read from a few select people will never scale either. Soon you will want to add the head of research and then the head of HR (or just the HR guy, if you only have one) so that you can tap into everybodies network for recruits.

For a small company: create alias for everyone. Everyone emails on Friday.

For a large company: create team alias, email it on Fridays.

Not that hard.

Snippets at Google had one other really useful tool when you're a large company.

You could subscribe to a keyword, and pick up any snippets that mentioned it.

As someone who was running a service that could get in the way of engineers doing their job, this was a great way to get honest, grassroots info.

I didn't know that. Wasn't obvious from the interface. (I just emailed snippets.)

I would think that services that provide organizational or team newsfeeds, like Yammer or Status.Net, provide very similar functionality (though perhaps without the synchronized weekly fomratting).