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