There has been a growing trend of supposed coolness to add features into webpages themselves on the premise of providing additional information for the visitor. In actual fact all they are is ways to further the advertising push so that website operators and bloggers can add additional ways to monetize their work.
The newest so-called feature is the one from Snap.com that adds a preview of a linked site on the page you are viewing. Now in theory this would be a really handy thing to offer your visitors but in practice it is a frikken pain in the butt that adds nothing put popup pollution; especially on link heavy pages.
I have seen this as a growing trend especially on blogs of late and even though I dabbled with the idea of adding it I quickly changed my mind after having to suffer through them on more and more of the sites I was visiting.
It appears also that I am not alone in this dislike of these so-called cool additions. In a post earlier this week Zero Boss described his flirtation with them and then in the resultant comments that followed he told why he had disabled them:
Ouch. Okay, this sounds like it’s not helpful, and is going to piss off too many hard-core readers. I’ve de-activated it. (New readers: if you want to see it in action, you can still check it out on the Snap.com page, or on TechCrunch.com.)
This was followed up today with a post over at Blogging Pro where David gave a definite thumbs down on the whole idea as well:
Against what I consider their better judgement, the folks over at WordPress.com have released the Snap Preview Live Anywhere plug-in into the general WordPress.com population.
I am not a fan of the plug-in. I think it degrades the user experience by not only adding what is basically extra javascript we don’t need, but I am the type of reader that highlights text as I go. I don’t want a bubble image of a website messing up my reading and distracting me.
Additionally when I brought up the idea of adding the Snap.com feature and others similar to it in the WinExtra forums the answer was a resounding No!; or as Dontor said:
Big ditto to that. Some tech sites seem to think we need those popups to define things. Drives me nuts. Absolutely hate them. I’ve used them for acronyms in sites, and have a calendar that will popup the events when you hoover over the date.
The readers have spoken – enough with the webpage pollution.
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I am so glad you decided against adding those previews. It never fails that is where my mouse lands when I stop to read. Great article title
Callow