wheresrhys

You’ve all seen websnapr at work most likely. Or rather, you’ve been one of its unsuspecting victims, innocently surfing the net when, suddenly, the rules all change and you’ve no idea which way is up and which way is left any more.

What websnapr does is convert any link on a website (or a select few chosen by the site’s publisher) into a useful preview thumbnail of the website in question, thus enabling the user to preview what’s at the other end of the link before clicking and wasting their time with something so time-consuming as as a visit to the site (see screenshot below). And it’s very easily installed by means of inclusion of a javascript file.

All well and good, you say… but is it? Is it really?

If you don’t want this heightened user experience it is quite obtrusive and off-putting; Accidentally drifting the mouse over a link while reading an article leads to bits being obscured and a brief “what was that?” moment, breaking your concentration. One of the golden principles of usability is to more or less stick to accepted norms of page layout and interface behaviour. Yes, these norms can be broken if you know what you’re doing, but websnapr is just added willy-nilly by website publishers who think it’s cool, without any real consideration for the fact that, to most of their visitors, it will make the website odd, and as for the most part we want our visits to websites to be straightforward, it will be a turn-off.

Related to this point (though slightly less subjective) is that only a minority of sites on the internet use websnapr, and it’s likely to stay that way. Possibly (notwithstanding my next point) I could accept that if every external link on every site gave a preview of the webpage it points to then this might be useful, but as this isn’t the case we all have to develop our own methodology for choosing which links to click. For instance, I hold down ctrl and click all the links that look interesting, to open them in new tabs. It’s surprising how automated this process is; I go for the ctrl key without even thinking. Showing me unexpected, thumbnail previews gives me more information than I’m used to and, it’s reasonable to suggest, could actually slow down my web browsing. (And for people who like to have the previews on all sites, there are firefox extensions (and probably ie7 by now) that achieve the same thing).

This interpretation becomes even more plausible when we take a closer look at what the thumbnail previews show us. Look at the one above for CNN. What preview information does it give us?

It tells us the website is CNN.com by virtue of the logo… and that’s about it. The text is too small to read, even the headings (and out of date to boot – today’s site has a big picture tribute for Michael Jackson, conspicuous by its absence in the screenshot). Is it useful to know the website you’re being directed to? Yes, definitely, but it hardly merits making a tiny visual copy of the site, which in many cases might shoot itself in the foot by obscuring the website’s identity as not all logos are legible at small resolution. You could argue that the preview also gives you a more holistic feel for the site; a glimpse of the design gives you a hint of the website’s tone, a guess at the intended audience etc…, but even this is shaky justification. The design’s impact and general feel are largely lost in the shrinking.

And finally, I can’t help thinking that websnapr goes against the spirit of the internet. Contrary to it’s probable aim of making it easier to discover and filter new sites, it actually devalues the most useful tool of all for doing this: the link itself! Links don’t just appear from nowhere. They are put there because the author of the piece you are reading thought you might like to visit an extra site. If you value the author’s opinion – whether due to a long-standing readership or being impressed by the current article – that should be enough to justify clicking through.

After all this, I don’t want to put too much of a downer on websnapr. I think it’s useless as a tool for making clicking on links more productive, but it’s still impressive that you can get a screenshot of any site on demand. There has to be a use for it somewhere… but what??

I like Last.fm. I really do, though I don’t use it as much as I used to, for trivial reasons (where I work at the moment my PC’s box is a tower on the floor, rather than on the desktop, so my headphones don’t reach). But despite not using the website to listen to music, I do still want it to record what I listen to, partly because when I do start listening again I want it to have up to date information on my music tastes, and partly because I’m a bit of a geek and like to check every now and then if Elliott Smithis still my top artist in figures as well as in esteem.

But Last.fm does have one major annoyance. The Last.fm software for scrobbling information about the music you play to the website is far more bulky than needs be. It contains a player (not really necessary now they’ve introduced the ability to play straight from the website), and also reminds you incessantly to download plug-ins for every mainstream media player you have, even if you only use one, and as you can’t uninstall Windows Media Player, this means a lot of updates of no benefit to you. It also requires updating very frequently and will remind you every time you start iTunes, thus disrupting the mood that put you in mind to listen to some music in the first place.

I needed something better. And I found it.

iSproggler is a little application developed by some Last.fm user(s) which is a bare bones sproggler for iTunes. If you set it to run when windows opens it will send all your listening data to Last.fm and nowt else. It’s reliable, discreet, uses a fairly small amount of resources, and most importantly never nags you to be updated; exactly what the Last.fm software should be like. Also it’s name, as I’ve just discovered, is rather humorous, be it deliberate or not.

It does however have one minor setback – every time you close iTunes it asks you to click OK, but even though this happens every time (as opposed to the Last.fm software reminding you to upgrade only until you upgrade it) it bothers me a lot less as it doesn’t delay my listening to the music I’ve decided would suit the moment.

To download it you need to join the iSproggler group, but it’s a small price to pay.