I removed Snap’s previews from here

Thank goodness you came around. I saw Snap for the first time the day of your birthday post. Within three minutes I’d bitched at you in your comments, blocked Snap via Opera, and entered Snap’s servers in my hosts file for IE.

Snap has to visit these web sites to generate that preview picture. I just wonder how long it will be until certain, less ethical, web site owners start feeding Snap a completely different page. Then Snap preview shows clean, safe looking, ad free, page but when you visit you get a thousand ads, porn, goatse, and spyware downloads.

Good idea Neil…!

Good move, Robert. I absolutely can’t stand them; I never really understood why people have them.

It could be worse.

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.

How about like key shortcuts,

say shift+click, that way it wont be intrusive.

just a thought.

Copyright 2007, genius comment inventions inc.

Quote: “I have been talking with the Snap folks, though, and they are working hard on answering these concerns.”

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.

Hello,

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
http://www.Snap.com

Jason, what a wonderfully articulate and graceful response to what I always thought was too many people jumping on the bandwagon.

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 don’t get the complaining at all. for all the rants, how many users like it silently? i’m put it across my site. i also think it’s great that snap is listening to users to figure out features and controls. any plan to grab the first frame of video for .mov files? thanks to everyone at snap.com

the snap previews is a time saver. the bubble let me decide what links are worth following at the “point of sale”. i trust your linkink robert but i don’t have time to follow each and every one of them. with previews i spend more time on your site or checking out sites you link to. with previews i spend less time on sites i did not want to visit after all.

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!

Thanks for removing them…they were driving me crazy and were terrible for usability as its so unexpected and disrupts your viewing of the site.

I like the Snap previews. I like getting a glimpse of where a link would take me; it helps me to make a more informed decision.

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.

Bring them back. Maybe I am less geek than many of your readers but I really found them helpful.

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

I thought Snap previews were extremely nifty the first time I saw them (me, magpie, chirp!). And I contemplated using them on some of my sites.

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.