Snap.com Previews: Magic or Menace?
Sarah Perez on May 21st, 2007
They’re everywhere these days - the snap.com previews! As your mouse moves across the screen, the pop-up website previews display, often hiding the text you were trying to read. However, their profusion must mean that they are popular…or are they? When I saw this tip via LifeHacker, I began to wonder if perhaps a snap.com backlash is coming: "How to Disable Snap.com Previews." Useful little tip - I think I might be implementing it, but would you? How do you feel about the snap.com previews? Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Take the poll:
Follow the conversation at YackTrack!
I was one of the early adopters…until readers started complaining. That tiny window really doesn’t give the reader much information. Now…if the pop-up was instead a line of text in the status bar it might be useful. Wait, I can already do that myself.
So, yeah, it was cute for a day, but the pop-ups are a pain.
At first I thought they were a pain. But then I found a site using it to preview other websites pulled up in a listing (the site listed blogs). I only wanted to see blogs with clean unique presentations at the time and believe it or not - Snap was useful in helping to ascertain that BEFORE I clicked. I floated the icons over each listing result and if I saw some generic Blogger skin or whatever, I moved on. No grind grind to open a new browser/tab window each time.
SO I guess the answer is, yes, it is another useful tool for some websites to better deliver an impression of what’s next where an “impression” has value. But like anything, there’s a risk of over usage. Some webmasters will use it for everything just for the sake of it and that will be truly annoying.
Dave