King  Gary 

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.