-
Website
http://www.scobleizer.com/ -
Original page
http://scobleizer.com/2007/01/30/i-removed-snaps-previews-from-here/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
Top Commenters
-
danja
44 comments · 4 points
-
polizeros
52 comments · 1 points
-
AndyBeard
69 comments · 4 points
-
Zachary Adam Cohen
35 comments · 8 points
-
dbarefoot
40 comments · 3 points
-
-
Popular Threads
-
The best and worst thing Twitter did in 2009: RT
22 hours ago · 20 comments
-
World-brand-building mistakes France’s entrepreneurs make
1 week ago · 181 comments
-
2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore
6 days ago · 67 comments
-
iPhone developers abandoning app model for HTML5?
6 days ago · 51 comments
-
Google eating Yelp?
5 days ago · 25 comments
-
The best and worst thing Twitter did in 2009: RT
Nick Wilson has a great point, but before he complains about usability on other people's site, he might want to get the comments working on his own. =P
Jason
ContentLink is another that drives me nuts...see the double underlined links...
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2007/01/30.7...
I get 100x more annoyed when visiting sites that are slowed down by truckloads of ads, animated graphics etc. And there are plenty of those!
The problem with Snap IMHO is that it's not very useful. It may offer a tiny bit of voyeuristic satisfaction, but for it to add value it should do more, have some smart way to zoom in or something...
For those of you who have it on your blogs - I'm glad I'm not subscribed, that's all I can say.
Why do I hate it so? Signal-noise. simply that, a postcard snapshot of the link is not going to tell me anything useful about the link 9 times out of 10. Maybe give me some warning if a page is "not work safe" or something, but 9 times out of 10 it's just blocking what I wanna read.
But hey, you wanna clutter your weblog with it, it's a free internet....
Anyways Scoble, again, thanks for dumping it. Also, thanks for providing full-text in your feed, too. :)
"I don’t really get why people are so annoyed by this - when I happen to read a blog outside a feed reader, I generally use the scrollwheel with minimal mouse-hovering, so there are little or no accidental pop-ups."
Gosh.
I'm guessing you've not done much usability testing. Generally speaking, rating a UI does not consist of "Hey, I think it's fine! What's the problem? Get the hell out of my test lab!"
I think Snap need to do some usability testing - I've seen lots of people who move the mouse cursor over text - in varying patterns - as they read it (I used to do that, but somewhere along the line I stopped). Imagine how annoying Snap previews are to them.
Hell, I even know someone who clicks and drags over text to select each paragraph as he reads it. It's an almost unconscious thing for him, but all these things should be taken into account when adding 'UI' (or just plain noise, in the case of Snap) to plain text.
Plain text is simple and readable - apart from adding aesthetic formatting and affordances, there's not much need to mess with it, unless you have a dumb idea/business plan.
The idea is good, just the implementation irritates people. Previewing a link can be useful but it should be at the user's discretion.
They have to know there's a preview available and they have to control when it appears. Giving bloggers the ability to embed previews precisely and selectively would be good, too.
Short, short version: Give me more control and don't interrupt when I'm concentrating.
But replace them with something really useful - that doesn't needlessly eat bandwidth - the Sphere It widget. In just two days it's become the most populat outgoing link on my site - because it doesn't slow page loads down, it has to be clicked on to be activated, AND it provides interesting data.
http://www.sphere.com/tools#getsphered
And no, I have no affiliation with them.
Rob
I, too, am glad you ditched the snap previews. Just text, thanks. I'm a command line sort of guy.
I used to like snap alot as a search engine, until they started adding news and download our toolbar crap to their index page. Ask.com has the most elegant index page of any search engine in my opinion. The rest of them are too busy. Don't even throw in Google, since I refuse to use them, China among other reasons.
Th
:)
Blessings.
I think everyone has the conversation wrong - it's not command line vs. visually oriented people. It's first and forthmost what are the benefits of snap.
Like I said above, I'm having a hard time figuring out why any blogger would want to provide a website preview to their readers. I think your readers trust that you won't link to goatse or something. And if I'm interested in a topic I don't see myself skipping out on a website because it looks like it has too many ads - my motivation to see the site probably comes second to whether or not there are too many ads.
A few weeks ago Alex Faaborg proposed a visual element for firefox's history: http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/01/13/basi...
THAT's where visualization makes a great deal of sense! To serve as memory aid.
If there's something I'm missing about the usefulness of Snap, can someone enlighten me?
Got my email?
It's not Scoble's links previews are useful for, it's the links to commenter's sites. You have to wonder about some of them you know...
Actually, a lot of the upset over Snap is jealousy. Why did I think of that!? If it didn't have a logo, probably would be fewer complaints.
So what is the point of this thing again? To show us pointless thumbnail images?
Power users, adblock this : http://spa.snap.com. Problem solved, not just for all Wordpress blogs (apparently Wordpress's founder allows the blog owner to switch off the Snap add-on) but also on every other site on the planet.
You can do it in Presentation/Extras.
I find SNAP intrusive, annoying, and pointless.
The only good use I've seen of it is hovering over an image preview to see a larger version of it.
If you have a tendency to read blogs as their published it's doubly useless because the preview is never there.
Anyway, good decision, and good blog!
IMHO, anyone NOT liking it is not understanding the true meaning of being a blogger. Blogging is as much about posting information as it is linking to other sources (no need to tell Robert about THAT one!).
The service enabled me to look at blogs that with a standard text link I may not have bothered looking at.
Maybe the execution could be improved? How about a "Snap Certified Blog" icon which demonstrates to users that by hovering over the link for a period of time would trigger the link window? Can the code be set to pop open the window after a LONGER period of time?
Great idea and particularly relevant to the linking theme of the last few days. Anything that encourages people to respect the content of others by linking is a good thing for me.
Rex
Hardly. It forced me to care about where my cursor was so I didn't accidently have some pop-up block what I was reading. You're misspelling "annoyance".
think Snap’s auto opt-in has a value in general, but not for what they do. Can’t say more.
"auto" opt-in? That's um...that's what is normally called "opt-OUT". See, when you have to take action for it to STOP, that's an opt-OUT system. There's a difference.
The service enabled me to look at blogs that with a standard text link I may not have bothered looking at.
In a bloody inch square? What, precisely, did that tell you about the link?
I'd turn it on. I like the choice. How about it?
I can't disagree with you on the whole John, but it has some use. If on first glance, the Snapshot makes a blog look fairly good, I would probably give it a look.
Personally, the appearance of a blog says as much about the content as the content itself (although others would argue that the appearance attempts to hide a lack of quality content...like mine!!) so it is important for me to gauge credibility form looking at a preview of the page.
That said, involuntary pop-ups died when Firefox came out so why all go back to it???
Tool-tips such as the service IntelliTXT from http://www.vibrantmedia.com/ (i.e., used at http://www.activewin.com )are just as irritating.
Although it may not be the case now, but ASAP (Alliance of Security Analysis Professionals, see http://asap.maddoktor2.com/charter.html ) found tool-tips directed to malware installation sites. Both the MVPS Host file and IE-SPYAD list that URL of vibrantmeida.
I love it, personally.
Those sites that have the double underscore links to seemingly random words within articles that come up with similar pop up ballon ads that are related to that word are especially annoying.
The ads are usually are unrelated article, only that one word or phrase that has the double-underscored link, which made the ads even more awful as they were non sequiturs.
At least the Snap links were an attempt to be useful and relevant.
say shift+click, that way it wont be intrusive.
just a thought.
Copyright 2007, genius comment inventions inc.
I've seen all the complaints registered in the comments of this post from others, but I was just wondering: are these complaints the same as yours? Do you have other issues with this feature? I've been doing a site for a co-worker http://movielanddirectory.com, which is a movie related tour guide of the LA area, and he was asking me about the possibility of adding Snap to the site. I definitely do not want to do that if it will just irritate most users.
Any-hooo, any info on the details of your concerns would be appreciated. Though the comments here already make me abit leary.
I wanted to thank Robert again for taking the time and effort to give Snap Preview Anywhere a spin on this site.
As Robert alluded to in his post, we here at Snap are acutely aware of the issues described and we have several enhancements scheduled to release over the coming couple of weeks that in different ways will address these issues.
Rest assured that your and your readers' viewpoints have been, and will continue to, inform the ongoing development of this product.
Jason Fields
Product Evangelist, Emerging Technology
www.Snap.com
If they all thought it was so bad isn't it funny how many people actually signed-up to it in the first place?
I wonder just how many people in these comments thought how good it was - well aware of the pop-up implications etc.
There is a perfectly good reason you grew so quickly - because it was (and in my mind, still is) a great idea and I look forward to seeing further innovations!
i wonder if the people complaining here are the same people that were whining and moaning when web designers all of a sudden started using graphics. good thing that practice never took off!
change hurts... consider how much easier it is to say "no" than "yes" when confronted with something new and unfamiliar.
status quo is NOT good enough!
And for those who don't like the previews, it so easy to disable (and NO, you don't have to go to Snap's site to do it). You just click "options" on any preview bubble, and from there you can opt-out of the preview for the one site you are on, or all sites.
So to me, leaving it running on your site gives me the option. Taking it off your site takes away my choice. I'd like to see it back.
I read in the thread that you (a reader) can easily turn them off if you don't like them. (And if the vocal crowd is so advanced that they dont need them, why can they figure out how to turn them off. Sounds simple based on the above!)
Keeping them on and making it easy to turn off seems like a great solution to keep everyone happy.
ST
Then, recently, I began noticing that most of the popup windows were empty.
They gotta fix it so the popup doesn't pop up unless it has something to offer. Otherwise, it's just STUPID.