Snap Preview shows websites without clicking links!
Snaps Preview is a new tool that allows webmasters to include a Javascript file to their websites to allow users to hover over links, and making a small window appear that gives a visual preview (a thumbnail) of the website, before visiting it. This reminds me of the Cooliris Previews extension for Firefox, which does the same thing except it works on the browser’s end; the problem with it, for me, is that it is way too big. I really like Snaps far more because of the small size, which allows it to load much faster. Also, the thumbnails are from Snaps’ server instead of the respective website, so they typically load more quickly, too.
I hope this gets adopted fairly quickly by websites, as it seems to me that it could definitely be a really useful tool for information-hungry-yet-busy web surfers, as all you’d have to do is hover over a link to find out what kind of website it is (does it have a lot of ads? Is it a forum? Does it have a blog format? You can find all of this out just by looking at the thumbnail preview), and then click on it if you so desire.
I can understand if this actually annoys some people, so in the future, it would be nice if they had another bit of code which allowed users to turn the feature on and off on the website that implemented it.
Something like this would typically be fairly difficult to monetize, as you wouldn’t want to, say, blast the user with AdSense in that tiny little preview box. So, it’s a good thing that Snaps already has their own search engine, because they added a tiny search box underneath each website preview, tempting you to use it. Once you use it, they’ve ensnared you into using their Snaps search engine, which is a win-win situation, as you aren’t bothered with much that you don’t want except for a small, barely noticeable text box in the link preview.
Also, I’ve installed this script onto my website, so you can check it out by hovering over links.
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What else could we put in the popups? Maybe website reviews, del.icio.us tags, Google PageRank, or other data? The popups look great and I’d certainly like to have them wherever I browse.
Strategically I think it makes a great Google extension or browser advanced feature. Maybe Google could add it to the Google Toolbar.
Yeah, although I think that if you added anything else to the popups, they’d be pretty bloated already since they look very minimal - and it looks like they have just the right amount of content and used up space in the popup.
Also, if you like this preview feature, you might want to take a look at this as well: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/189/
Have you tried Google Preview? A firefox extension, it’s not as comprehensive as the system you describe but it does elaborate on Google searches. Jerry, can we please not fight on Gary’s blog, you’re being inconsiderate.
Adam,
Why’d you mention Jerry? Also, that link in my comment IS Google Preview
It’s a nice bit of flash, but it serves no real purpose. For all practical purposes it’s just an unnecessary nuisance.
It’s not Flash; it’s Ajax. Anyways, on certain websites, it would be useful, and on others, not so much. For instance, a website that does a lot of website reviews would maybe find it more useful than a website with a forum, where the text is so tiny that you can’t read it, anyways.
What if they took a sample of the small font from the site and add it on the preview as a scrolling marquee? That could work.
Adam,
That wouldn’t work, because how would the script know which text to pull from a website? What if it pulled the navigation bar instead of the content? Then it wouldn’t be useful. Also, scrolling text, or almost anything animated on a web page, that isn’t activated by the user, is not very good aesthetics for a website.
How about extracting the headlines and minus the scrolling for a news magazine site?
It might be a good idea, but still, the script should be as generic as possible. For instance, Google doesn’t extract specific information that it deems important from specific websites, because it’s a generic search engine that shows the generic stuff (page title, URL, etc.) to you instead of showing specific things for specific websites, like news or magazine sites.