Outside the Beltway

Snap Previews

James Joyner
18

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I added the Snap Preview Anywhere feature, which provides thumbnails of linked websites upon mousing over the link, to the site about a month ago because I’d seen it elsewhere and liked it. A couple of readers complained about it this afternoon, so I’ve added a badge after the ads in the left sidebar that supposedly makes the previews optional.

Does anyone but me find them interesting?

UPDATE (3/10): The consensus seems to be that they’re more annoying than interesting, so I’ve disabled them. I’ve left them on OTB Sports and Gone Hollywood for the time being, as they have a different kind of audience.

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18 responses to “Snap Previews”

  1. ob1 Avatar
    ob1

    I find them very annoying and worthless. What is the point? If I am interested in the link, I’ll click it, if I am not, then I won’t. A tiny preview will not change anything.

  2. paladin Avatar
    paladin

    No! Make them stop! For some reason, I can’t get them to stop and they cover the “real” part of your blog. Please, please, PLEASE make them stop!

  3. Mister Biggs Avatar
    Mister Biggs

    I think they are nifty.

  4. yetanotherjohn Avatar
    yetanotherjohn

    Make them go away or I shall taunt you a second time.

  5. yetanotherjohn Avatar
    yetanotherjohn

    BTW, I was able to make them go away, but I had to reload your page to make that take affect. It even had the option to disable it for all sites. Hurray.

  6. Kent G. Budge Avatar
    Kent G. Budge

    I dislike them. Intensely.

  7. McGehee Avatar
    McGehee

    FWIW, I was interested in them enough to try them on my own site, but the novelty wore off in a hurry. As a rule I guess I just prefer that things not pop-up on mouseover, unless they’re plain tooltip-type things showing a very small amount of text.

  8. Scott_T Avatar
    Scott_T

    I like them for the plain simple fact that they allow a viewer to “preview” a link, and if it comes up blank under the Snap Preview, you know your company’s internet filter has canned the preview.

    Thus you know what your company does NOT want you looking at. Like anything with “anna nicole smith” in the title name.

  9. Steven Taylor Avatar
    Steven Taylor

    I’ve been meaning to mention them, but hadn’t gotten around to it.

    I find them to be about 10% interesting, but 90% very annoying.

  10. htom Avatar
    htom

    Very annoying. There are several variations of this from different places, and they are all very annoying. (The first was cute for about thirty seconds.)

    Scott — yes, it shows blank if it can’t get the data, but it’s already tried to get the data, so your company knows you were trying to look there, even if you weren’t.

  11. bains Avatar
    bains

    I find them quite annoying – If I am curious where the link leads, I just look in the bottom pane of my browser.

    Yetanotherjohn, where did you find the feature to turn off all snap previews? Is is browser specific?

  12. Gollum Avatar
    Gollum

    It took a little adjusting (taking more care where the mouse goes) but at the end of the day I like them. One drawback when ‘snapping’ links *within* OTB is that your new format of having ads in the center column above the fold usually means that you can’t get a real snapshot of the linked page – – you just get the ads.

  13. Antonio Avatar
    Antonio

    they are not really that bad of an idea.

  14. Beldar Avatar
    Beldar

    (1) Very high on the coolness and eye-candy meters.

    (2) Very low on the actual utility meter, and potentially a drag on through-put and loading speed.

    (3) Very high on the annoying meter, once you realize that (2) above outweighs (1) above.

  15. John Burgess Avatar
    John Burgess

    I found it got to be annoying quickly and turned it off (through the ‘options’ found when right-clicking on one of the pop-up windows).

  16. yetanotherjohn Avatar
    yetanotherjohn

    bains,

    Upper right hand corner of the pop up had the link for options. In there, it had two buttons (I think in the middle of the second pop up). One for disable this site, the other for disable all sites. I don’t know if the disable all is working because OTB was the only one with good enough content to justify wading through the annoying snaps.

  17. Rodney Dill Avatar
    Rodney Dill

    It was slightly annoying, but I decided to give it a try before commenting. I did find it useful to check that the links were correct before I posted, but this is little benefit to people just browsing. Being able to turn it on would be useful, but the default should be off.

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