Jul 20
2008Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com
Filed Under: Blogging, Miscellaneous
2271 visits, 1 today
I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display inline videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.
Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you “look ahead,” before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.
Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.
To be canded, I use the Adblock Firefox extension to block all Snapshots on any site – I think it is one of the most annoying things on the web right now.
Micah Sittigs last blog post..Counterstrike, Shanghai metro version
Hi Micah, when I first installed Snapshots, popups appear for every link (both externally and internally) and yes, that was very annoying. I’ve modified the settings so that Snapshot popups appear for only external pages. There aren’t too many external links so I think it’s less annoying now.
I do find the popups useful (the ones without all the ads) because I can get a glimpse at what the link is about before clicking on it. Links to other blogs appear as a RSS feed. I saw another blog had Snapshots for just external links and I liked it.
Cooliris, maker of the popular PicLens, has a similar feature called Preview which you install on your browser (not a specific website). I did find that annoying because I didn’t want every page and every link to have popups.
If you are reading the post through an RSS feed, the popups won’t appear.