Snapshots – one (or maybe just half) better than websnapr
Yesterday I railed against the useless, so-called functionality added to web pages by websnapr. However, I did close by adding that the technology is impressive, if only somebody could find a use for it that isn’t sanity-shatteringly pointless.
You’re expecting me to say I/someone else has succeeded, but I’m not going to.
What I will point to instead is another service, very similar to websnapr, which is in fact very useful (though still suffering from the same problems as websnapr in a lot of cases). It’s called snapshots (and it, rather than websnapr, would also appear to be the market leader for this sort of thing).
Snapshots still suffers from the pervasiveness of the same annoying, information-scarce tiny screenshot provided by websnapr but, where possible, it makes that extra step (probably less technology intensive, in fact) to genuinely improve the user experience. Two examples I’ve discovered so far are:
- If the link is directed to wikipedia, a sizeable chunk of the article appears in the pop-up window, which is exactly what I would want to read if I went to the webpage itself.
- If the link is to google maps, it embeds the google map in the popup window.
These things which are both useful to see at a glance, not necessarily requiring loading a full web page. And there may be more examples where the snapshots preview is more than just eye-candy… so kudos to them. I just doubt, somehow, that they have an option to turn off the default screenshot previews.
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Tags: google maps, link preview, snapshots, wikipedia
Rhys,
I’m surprised that this and the websnapr post were made so recently. Your rant on the uselessness of the services shows that you are missing the point. That’s not a bad thing but I thought I’d shed some light on the subject, because comparing snap.com to websnapr beckons me to clarify the difference.
Snap is confusingly similar. It is a revenue-sharing search engine whose goal is to show relevant content in a hover link. When it has no relevant content to show, it shows a thumbnail of the website. They do not provide a service that embeds a thumbnail into a web page or application.
Websnapr, and similar services, provide a programmatic way to retrieve previews of websites for a multitude of useful purposes. Some of these include showing at-a-glance sites when a parent is looking at a list of websites that their children have visited (i.e. parental control) or when you want a nice user interface to show off designs of sites in a directory or listing of any kind. Using website screenshots is already the de facto and accepted standard for bookmarking (even in Google Chrome, Safari, and eventually all browsers) because it just makes sense.
There are many useful reasons to use a website thumbnail provider, so I just thought I’d cover a few.
Best regards,
Brandon
I’m not sure I’m missing the point. The point is that having a tiny preview of a website is useful. I just don’t agree with the point. Both the examples you use are not really normal web browsing. I object to thumbnail previews being thrust upon me when I’m not doing something where a thumbnail is useful which, as I argued, is most of the time.