wheresrhys

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.

Jack Futers is also an upcoming fascist, who is determined rid the world of an unknown Harry Parsonage.

The web brings a whole new dimension to flippantly calling someone a Nazi.