Snap.com | Shooting at Bubbles

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Posted 2316 days ago

Yesterday I wrote a post about the Snap.com preview feature that they have made available for bloggers to add to their blogs. This is a feature that will display a small graphic preview of the webpage whose link you hovered your mouse cursor over. The response seems to be mostly positive and hats off to Snap.com for freeing this feature for all to use; however there a percentage of bloggers really dislike it and based on their readers feedback have removed the feature; myself included.

This morning I noticed that my blog had been visited by a couple of the honchos from Snap.com and while they didn’t feel that my thoughts were worth commenting on I thank them for taking the time to drop by. I also want to mention that I used Snap.com as a default search engine for quite sometime when they first hit the search scene and liked the service but that was back in its infancy so to speak and results were still a little on the light side so I returned to my previous search engine.

Given that they had taken the time to visit me I felt it only fair to have another look at Snap to see what they were up to. After all search engines are a fluid beast and one should always go with one who can deliver the best results based on your needs at the time – Google is not the end all be all that everyone thinks it is.

The first thing that I noticed was that their UI had changed quite a lot from the last time I had used them and that they had added an image search feature. Now this is something that I use all the time so I figured to give them a try since I am always open to new sources of images to use as part of my posts.

In general Snap’s image search results were very good; on par with what I get now from Live.com, but there was one very big drawback which knocks it out of the running, for me at least. As nice as the image browsing UI was it doesn’t make up for the fact that I had no way to download the images; at least not that I could find. Now whether or not this has to do with the fact that they are using Flash as the UI I don’t know but not having a download/save option makes the image search pretty much useless in my opinion.

Now to be fair the image search is marked as new (beta ); but then what isn’t these days, so maybe they will be adding that option. I’ll keep checking back incase they do but in the meantime it’s back to Live.com for my image needs.

Stop webpage pollution – Please

Category: Technology

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Posted 2317 days ago

But the benefits are so cool 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.