Snap Preview – The Latest Annoying Popup


Have you seen it yet? No? I’m surprised. It’s everywhere. A quick surmisation for you. Snap Preview allows the viewer of a website to see a preview of the website that is linked to from any site or blog. Yep, it’s that simple. It’s also that annoying.

Snap Preview As you can see from the image on the left, whenever the viewer hovers over a link (any link) within a Snap enabled website the preview pops up. Imagin that on a site for someone like //engtech who regularly uses lots of links in a blog postA great post by the way, you should go look! Middle click the link and open it in a new tab in Firefox. What, you’re still using IE6? SUcks to be you!. You won’t be able to see the content for the bloody Snap preview!

To make matters worse, the guys (I don’t know who) thought it would be a good idea to implement the service for wordpress.com blogs. Fair enough, it’s another little gadget that if the blogger wants it they can have it. What gripes me is that it is an opt out service. This means that it’s turned on by default and the blogger has to change the option to off for themselves.

When I am reading a blog I want to be able to read a blog. If I want to see the content at the end of link I will click the link and open it in a new tab thanks. So, please consider your readers and think carefully whether they want these annoying previews on the links. Unless you can answer 100% yes, please switch them OFF or remove the service from your blog.

, , , , , , , ,

  1. #1 by engtech on January 16th, 2007

    Yeah, everyone hates that Snap Preview after around 10 minutes.

    The best part is that if your linking to relatively fresh blog posts then most of the time they don’t even have a preview yet.

    You can use this link to set a cookie to turn it off for all blogs you visit even if the administrator doesn’t see the light:

    http://real.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php?disable_spa=1

  2. #2 by Collin on January 16th, 2007

    Sweet link, Cheers Eng!

    I discovered that you can do a similar thing by clicking “options” in the top right of the preview. It gives the option to disable them all with just a reload of the page. Does it for all sites too.

    Click that link folks!

  3. #3 by Snapper on January 17th, 2007

    OH SNAP!

  4. #4 by Daze on January 17th, 2007

    I’m finding more and more sites with Snap Preview on them. Its neat and clever, but damn annoying!

  5. #5 by Cat on January 18th, 2007

    Well, I’ve asked my readers whether they want it or not.

    The ones that replied like it for some reason….

(will not be published)

  1. No trackbacks yet.

Cornell Finch is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!