It appeared that without warning, and WordPress.com blogs have been hit with one of the new blights on the web: Snap Preview Anywhere.
Planet Mike just pointed out that my blog is now littered with Snap Preview Anywhere link page previews. When you hover over any link on my site, it loads a preview of that site in a small pop-up window.
To explain how I feel about this feature, I’m going to start with Mike’s words:
I have stumbled across several sites that are using this technology, and I find it distracting. I’m reading through a page, I scroll down and the mouse randomly ends up over a link. Poof! a pop-up window appears, and I’m looking at the preview of that linked page. It is quite distracting, partially because the preview is slow to load, and partially because something is happening on the web page that I’m not expecting. I’m not expecting anything because I’m not doing anything to cause something to happen. Simply moving my mouse and not clicking should not cause something to happen. The behavior is very similar to pop-up ads.
His last statement sums up my feelings about this beautifully.
I’ve also stumbled across these link previews and find them not just annoying and distracting but incredibly frustrating. My mouse will drift down as I’m reading and suddenly I can’t read what’s underneath the pop-up window. I move my mouse and it goes away, but why should I waste my wrist action on something I don’t want to see?
The technology loads more javascripts onto my page, affecting loading times. The scripts are loaded from offsite locations, not onsite, slowing down loading times as the script must travel farther. I’m now on satellite access so every click of the bandwidth meter counts. My experiences lately with very LONG page loads of my site now have some justification with the increase in javascript scripts and load times.
Personally, I consider these Snap Previews a blight on the web. If you are using them, you are introducing a non-accessibility feature to your site that slows your site down and increases the bandwidth on the web as well as on your site. You are actually hindering your users.
Think this gimmick through, folks. Do you really need this bell and whistle on your blog? It’s a nice gimmick, but if you have given people enough information about the link you are offering, isn’t that enough? Do they really need to see a tiny thumbnail view of the page they might visit? You can’t read the text, so what will a little picture tell you? It’s a pretty site, so make sure and visit it? Some of the most valuable sites I’ve found on the web are not pretty.
For web users who are visually impaired or physically challenged, the Snap Preview feature interferes with their viewing process. I have visually impaired friends who simply enlarge the font size to the equivalent of 72 points in order to read each letter of a word with their narrow vision, and when the link preview pops up, they don’t know what they are looking at because they cannot see the edges. They think they are looking at a picture on the site.
One nearly blind friend told me of her horrible first encounter with the Snap Preview. She uses her mouse to track what she is reading, moving it along with every word she slowly reads. She refuses to be “read to” by the Internet, wanting to use her eyes to the very last moment she can. When her mouse moved over the link, it became a graphic. Because it was out of her small circle of vision, when she got to it, she thought it was a graphic so scrolled down to the next line to read, thinking the text would wrap around the image as usual. It didn’t. She moved away before seeing the pop-up window go away and was totally lost in the content and confused. She went back up and experienced the same thing again. She finally closed the page, thinking it was a mistake on the part of the writer who put a graphic over their text and never got the point of the page she was reading.
When this first came out, I heard from another friend who is wheelchair bound with limited arm and hand motion. His frustration came from having to push the mouse around to avoid the link pop-up windows, often pushing the mouse beyond his limited reach in order to read the content.
While this might not impact you, statistics report a conservative estimate of 25% of web users are visually and physically handicapped. There are no warnings that these sites use Snap Preview, so they pop up on your screen and startle you. If there was a warning, it might change how people view and interact with the page. Is this what you want?
If you want to have your site meet accessibility and web standards, this gimmick doesn’t help, but it certainly does hurt.
There’s a small author-part of me that hopes what I write resembles some action-packed-page-turning-thriller and that people are glued to their screens eagerly embracing every word I write. I’d hate to have that experience be interrupted by an annoying pop-up window of any kind. Destroys the interaction of the reader with the written word, doesn’t it?
This reminds me of those nasty pop-up link ads where keywords are turned into links which will take you to advertising commercial sites instead of honest informative content. At least those have the decency to make their links be double underlined so you “know” this is an ad so you don’t have to click it.
As for WordPress.com developers and support, they are currently offline for the holidays, so I’m making my complaint public:
Please, please, turn off this annoying link preview feature and save it for those who want gimmicks on their own full version sites. At a minimum, allow us to turn the nasty thing off.
Apologies to My Readers
I’d also like to apologize to my readers for this unwanted and unchosen feature. I cannot install WordPress Plugins or Javascripts on this blog. I have no control over anything but the look and content, and the occasional WordPress.com Sidebar Widget. I did not install this and don’t want it, and I’m sorry if it frustrates you as much as it frustrates me.
As for other WordPress.com bloggers, if you are also unhappy with this feature, let them know, publicly or privately. If you like it, let me know why as I find little value in this.
And thanks for the heads up, Mike.
Stopping Snap Preview on Your WordPress.com Blog
Mark of WordPress.com pointed out that the Snap Preview feature was just announced and that there is an option to turn it off.
Not all blogs have it, and according to the comments on the announcement, those who do have it may not see the following instructions “yet” on their WordPress Administration Panels. This feature is still being tested, so make your views known.
To activate or remove the Snap Preview feature, go to Presentation > Extras and uncheck the Snap Preview feature box to remove it. To turn it back on, check the box. Then click Update.
As a note to WordPress.com developers and users, after disabling Snap Preview, my site’s web page loading speed increased several fold.
From what I’m reading in the announcement comments, people into gimmicks and bells and whistles on their blogs are thinking this is a cool feature. Some even think that it may encourage people to visit the links. Maybe, but I’m a basic user and representative of web site visitors around the world and I’m not motivated by a little thumbnail unless the content around the link motivates me to click it. Then I will click it so fast, the javascript doesn’t have time to load and pop-up.
UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that you can turn off Snap Preview Anywhere by visiting their site and “opting out”. Then, when you browse the web, anywhere Snap Preview exists, you will not see it. This is crap.
One, why should I send my precious time, energy, and traffic count to a website that creates something I don’t like in order to turn it off?
Two, how do they turn it off for “only me”? By collecting my IP address or other information that designates who I am on the web? My IP address changes all the time as I travel so much, hooking up through various Internet access points as I find them. So what information are they collecting that designates who I am when I’m on the web? Whatever it is, I probably don’t want them to have it. Do you? Still, why should I hand over my information in order to not get what I don’t want in the first place?
Three, this reminds me of the crap in the US years ago when they created the “opt-out list” for telemarketing phone calls. If you didn’t want someone to call you at nine at night to try to sell you something you never wanted in the first place, you had to sign up on a list that supposedly the telemarketers would check to verify you were on the list so they wouldn’t call you. Does that sound as stupid as it was? It didn’t work.
The best way to handle these things, if there is to be a “opt-out or opt-in” issue, is to allow those who want the gimmick to sign up to get the gimmick. Then the gimmickers/spammers/telemarketers/junk mail senders/etc. could ONLY use that list and not any other communication resource list. Let me tell you I want it, don’t assume I want it and then force me to jump through hoops in order to get out of it.
That’s good customer service.
Site Search Tags: snap preview, wordpress.com, wordpressdotcom, wordpress, preview links, snap preview anywhere
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
105 Comments
It’s not all blogs, it’s about 10%
You can disable it.
Feedback is asked for.
And it was blogged here: http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/12/29/snap-to-it/
I agree with you, i think it’s an irrating feature. Maybe i am one of the few people who visit a site because of the content and not how it looks like. I follow a link because the text triggers me and the little popup annoys me.
When it first came out, I thought this might be a cool little too. Now, as more people are using it, I’m finding it to be a major distraction to reading a page.
My advice is that if you are going to use it, make the number of links on a pager very limited. Better yet, don’t use it at all.
It’s not often I agree with you completely Lorelle, but in this case I most certainly do. Hate Snap Preview as is, and see little point on it, it’ll not be going anywhere close to any of my sites for some time to come, and although I don’t use it, I’ll be making sure it’s not on on my WP.com blog as well.
Just. No, it’s too bad a feature to even critique it any more than you have done, and for that I thank you.
You should rethink this decision in terms of the “services offered” to your audience. If you do not offer Snap Preview on your site it becomes at least for me less attractive. Ok, you have links for indepth information on your site. But the work for compiling this information is now put partly on a dead end.
With Snap Preview I was able to pre-check the link and could make my OWN informed (ok, “better informed”) decision to go or not to go to the site. Let me give an example. Your post contains around 20 links. Some of them look very promising. But I have not the time to click on every link to see what is behind what could be of interest for me. Actually the only way to get more information on what is behind this link is to check the presented URL at the bottom of the browser.
Maybe your site’s web page for loading speed increased several fold. But that is NOT THE RIGHT QUESTION. You have decreased my speed for getting all relevant information on your post. I got even the feeling that I could have missed something important in the information environment around your post. This is for me the main argument why things like Snap Preview are not a gimmick but a step forward to a new service dimension for me as a reader. For me there is no relation to pop-ups and other push-marketing things.
I fully understand your concerns about the usability for visually and physically handicapped. This needs more thinking and research. But simply reducing the service for other readers could not be the solution.
Enough arguments for rethinking your decision? Thank you very much for your high quality information on “Lorelle on WordPress” over the last years and have a happy new year!
Mike, you make a good point, but the point is a narrow one. Your “visual check” using Snap Preview is a visual one. It doesn’t tell you anything about the content or whether or not it’s worth clicking, does it? It simply shows you a thumbnail of the top part of the page and if the blog features a huge header graphic, like Matt Mullenweg does, all you see is the header graphic and not the content.
While a picture is worth a thousand words, on the web, pretty don’t count for much. Readability, content, link resources, and a whole lot more adds up to worth and this gimmick doesn’t give you any score card to measure a site’s value. If it did, then they’d have something worth considering, but I still wouldn’t need a picture of the site to tell me it’s worthy.
If this bell and whistle does anything “good” for readers, it lets you know if the page is “found” and the link is good. Otherwise, the reader would see a page not found error or something similar. That would save time.
Sorry, I missed this point on the first read.
How do you equal a visual “picture” of a link with indepth links like my manually produced related articles section of links? The two are completely separate issues. Snap Preview does not add links to my article content. It only shows previews of the links included. I still have to manually add these related link lists as WordPress.com blogs don’t include any widgets for related posts within the content area, only the sidebar.
I just wanted to clear that up. If Snap Preview really added something to my blog, I’d be happier, but I haven’t found any benefit yet.
You may disable it: when it appears click on “disable Snap Preview Anywhere™”…
like matGB said, it’s not often that i agree with you this wholeheartedly. thank you for posting this so explicitly.
Well guys it’s not really a “pop-up” if you think about it, it’s more along the lines of a “Fancy Tooltip” like many plugins made for WordPress for better tool tips which display alt or title text when hovering over something. But with those you can control which links or images have the feature.
The developer of the plugin should offer a quick button in the WP editor to add that class to a link when you want it this way we have more control.
That should keep the complaining down no?
Can you dig it?
Darren Rowse had an interesting article on this over at ProBlogger a couple of weeks back, you might want to check it out.
http://tinyurl.com/yxvp56
And I see that Darren has disabled this feature, too.
I think it’s attraction varies depending on the type of blog and the audience. For a blog like this, and for any tech-related blog in general, I tend to agree that it’s probably inappropriate. But for the blog I’m planning, which will be much more playful, I think it is appropriate and I plan to use it. I think in this case my projected audience will enjoy it.
I’m usually MUCH more bothered by flash, animated gifs, scrolling banners, or anything else on a website that oozes across my screen. I have Adblock and Flashblock extensions activated, and my basic approach is: If it moves, it has to go away.
Actually, Snap Preview is a good deal more adjustable than most users realize. Not only can you turn it on and off globally, it’s also possible to activate it or deactivate it for individual links. My inclination is to activate for sidebar links but NOT for links within text, which would solve the problem your vision-impaired friend had.
good post. i read the comments on the wordpress.com blog and i was shocked that so many people were in favor of it. i just really found it annoying and i don’t see what purpose it serves. seeing a thumbnail of the website isn’t going to make me open it anymore than just coming across a link in the text.
Yikes. I just came across something called “MyBlogLog ClickTagging” which pops up the message — complete with its own logo above it — that I’m hovering over the “7th most popular outgoing link.” Now THAT’S idiotically useless.
Great argument, I have as of now disabled SNAP. Its not worth the long page-loading
I don’t mind it being there, but turn it off by default and let the users turn it on manually. Most blogs I’ve seen that use Snap end up turning it off because users hate it…
now if they’d include a MyBlogLog sidebar widget…
I get pop-ups like these on webpages occasionally when I am googling something, but they are adds, not link previews, to me.
Snap preview definitely has its uses. On my website, we have a page that promotes our Top 10 sites (can see it at agridwork.com/?page=top) and its nice to have an easy way to display a screenshot of these sites. However, I do agree that many blogs overdue it.
I like Snap Preview and put it on my blog for a few days. My readers did not like it. Many of my readers are not “geeks” and didn’t understand it. In fact one reader told me she thought she had some kind of malware/spyware on her computer. I removed it even though I think it’s a nice feature.
I’m curious about your statement that 25% of web users are handicapped. While at the same time saying “this might not impact you.” Doesn’t your statement mean that at least 25% of your readers are handicapped? Where did you get this information, do you have a link? A quick check of Wikipedia says that 90% of all blindness is in developing countries. They are probably not daily web surfers. Probably spending most of their time working or looking for something to eat. Wikipedia also says that 70% of legally blind persons do not use computers. Please explain the statement that 25% of web users are handicapped.
Thanks for the explanation. I don’t use wordpress.com, but I’ve been wondering what was going on. I figured it was some kind of annoying new advertising scheme.
For the record, when one of these things pops up, I leave the site immediately without following the link. That would seem to contradict its intended attractiveness.
WordPress.com users ought to be offered this as an opt-in choice, not forced to accept it until they opt out.
I agree that Snap Preview is annoying. I would prefer something simpler which just shows, maybe via a small icon next to the link, whether the link is broken or not. It would be nice not to have to click on a link to find out it is 404.
Thank you!
I tried this out on my blog when it first came out. I initially thought it was cool, but then I had difficulty turning it off for internal links and only using it for external links. Then I tried reading my pages with it and quickly realized that it could be extremely distracting, so I removed it a couple hours later.
The company behind this recently emailed me to ask why I wasn’t using it. I never bothered to reply.
Hopefully they will read this.
Lorelle, I think you should tell us how you really feel. 😉
As you already noted, you can turn it off for your blog, and there’s also a link on the Snap site to turn it off for every site you ever visit on the web, so even if a site has it enabled you won’t see it. Also notice that we’re testing this feature, and based on feedback we’ll shape how and if we roll it out for real.
I’ll look into the load times, but with the profiling in Firebug Snap doesn’t seem to account for any major difference in your load times, certainly not several times. Your page does load fairly slowly, but it seems to be related to the multitude of images more than anything else. As you said, each request causes latency and for some things, like the 8 translation button images, they might be served just as well with text and save everyone’s browser 8 round trips to the server.
By the way, one of the reasons you were in the beta group is because you always give lots of thoughtful feedback, so thanks for taking the time to write this entry.
I’m grateful that you don’t like Snap. I don’t like it either, why oh why does wordpress.com implement this feature?
They should move it from the dashboard. Anyone must know for themselves if they integrate snap. But i think WordPress is going a bit too far with making an extra option in the adminpanel and integrate it.
Regards
I mean.. where will it end? Why not let Snap provide a nice plugin like others do. I tried it some time ago. No specific problems with load time.. but with validation at w3c.
Just click this link and Disable Snap Preview for any website that uses this plugin. Moreover you can enable it again 😉
Great thoughts Lorelle.
I’ve been to a few sites that use this feature, and I really find it annoying too – I’m there to read content on the page, and this preview thing was really distracting.
On my own blog site, I’ve already had enough external javascripts to slow my page load time (like StatCounter and Google Ads) – so adding another one doesn’t sound right too.
I guess if the blog author really wanted a screenshot of a page, he would have done it and made it an image 🙂
Actually, I remember there is one ad system that does something like that too (only that it pops up an ad instead of the preview of the page), and that was quite popular in forums!
A well thought out post, as always, and far better than my own whinges about this horrible “feature”. SPA is immensely distracting and very slow – and so unnecessary. As far as I can see, it offers no useful functionality whatsoever.
Unfortunately, although it has been imposed on my own blogs, the Extras menu has not been provided on any of them, and I simply cannot turn SPA off.
What makes me really mad is that this “feature” was unleashed, with no notification to the subjects of the test – who are then asked for feedback when the feedback mechanism is turned off!
O.K. I can (and certainly have) disabled SPA on own machine and no longer have to be irritated by it. But I’m madder than hell that I can’t give my readers the choice of opting in to something that (in my opinion) only a small minority of naive users might wish to see/use, rather than troubling the savvy majority to go opt out. I know my readers – this is likely to annoy them to the extent of disappearing altogether – especially as the opt out mechanism requires the use of cookies
I feel completely let down by WordPress – for the first time ever.
Hi Lorelle.
I too have this silly thing on my website. I liked it initially, but now after reading your experience with it, I think I’ll remove it. Since I host my blog independently, I’ll just have to remove the extra JavaScript that I recently added to my template.
Thanks All,
I’m new to designing websites and I thought that Snap was interesting for the audience I was looking to attract. The more I read between pros and cons I have to say the cons have won me over. At first I thought that the cons simply spoke for the geeks of simplicity and elegance – then I realized that even the naive like me would find Snap annoying and frustrating. So I will do the right thing and remove it from my site. Thanks for the clear thinking and statements of experience.
It makes sense for outgoing links in a blogroll or delicious scrape, but for internal links it’s annoying. There probably isn’t an easy way to apply it only desired sections.
Yet one more reason why you should host your own blog. Using WordPress is, IMHO, the best blogging platform… but you are officially ‘stuck’ with decisions someone else is making about your brand. Additionally, should WordPress.com somehow lose it’s growth, stability, impact, etc., you are stuck with them since every search engine has ranked you associated with ‘lorelle.wordpress.com’.
I was a blogger guy at first… but quickly moved to my own domain and hosted account when I saw the writing on the wall.
Regards,
Doug
I want to know when accessibility went back out of fashion. Things were good for a while when everyone switched from tables to CSS and realised that popup windows and
target="_blank"were stupid, but now javascript is trendy again it seems accessibility no longer is. Ditto caring about people on dialup. I don’t mind WP enabling the stupid little doodads for the sheep that really want it (they’ll get bored of it in a couple of months anyway), but, as I said on the news blog, it needs to be an opt-in-once feature rather than an opt-out-twice (or multiple times, if you’re on multiple computers) one.I also don’t see that Matt’s in a position to make cracks about the unnecessary images causing your slow load times, seeing as he’s the guy with the 150kb header…
Doug: I believe WordPress.com will be “around” for a while and I have several other full version blogs with high page rank that keep me going. This blog was one of the first experimental blogs on WordPress.com and it’s part of my work to maintain it, reporting on bugs and helping the support crew trouble shoot.
WordPress is very important to me in so many ways, allowing me the freedom to concentrate on my writing free from the stress load of maintaining a website. This blog is my way of giving back to the community that has given me so very, very, very much.
That girl again: Matt and other members of the WordPress.com team think long and hard about any element that add or subtract to WordPress.com. There are a LOT of young, gimmick-loving bloggers here who have been requesting Snap Preview, I’m sure. They brought it online as a small test. Normally, I would have let them know about this privately, as part of my reporting on bugs and concerns, but feedback support was closed for the holidays and this feature is one that is high on my annoying list on all sites, so I brought it up publicly. From the response, I’m glad that I’ve helped others take another look at this feature to see if it will really work for them, or against them.
As for accessibility, web designers need to NEVER forget their audience, whether they are blind, healthy, young, old, or using bizarre browsers. It’s always top on my list.
As for Matt’s comment, I’ve hated those icons since I put them on, but they serve as an example for several how to articles that remain very popular. I will be writing a little more about them, and then they are gone. I really can’t stand them, so he was picking on me as a friendly stab since he knows I’m a hater of gimmicks and blog bling. Thanks for defending me, though.
I tried it when it first came out and kept it on my site for lessa than a half an hour.I found it incredibly annoying and knew others would too.
The new feature just simply annoying! I have no other words to describe it.
mark.wordpress.com is the Automattic employee formerly known as Podz, the one who posted the first comment. markjaquith.wordpress.com is me, not an Automattic employee, and not associated with WordPress.com beyond indirect influence as a WordPress developer.
Dang! I was sure your brilliance had been scooped up. Thanks for clearing this up.
I just installed Snap Preview this week, then I read your entry…it is now disabled. You raised extremely valid points I had not thought of, and it is now gone. Thanks!
Snap Preview ISN’T NICE and I agree with you on that!
Websites that started using it are more difficult to read because of that…
It’s good that it’s optional and you can disable it on your blog:)
I’ll admit that initially I thought it was a good idea. I saw it on someother people’s blogs and I thought it was a cool idea. I’m all about inovation. However, if it’s going to cause problems for people, especially people with handicaps then it’s just overkill.
I like to be inovative, but not at the expense of others.
Hi
I was actually going to install this feature until I was directed by this article by a friend on the web standards group mailing list.
I do not think many people actually visit my site but the little that do, I do not want them to be thrown off it by a distracting feature. I think it is a cool feature that if it could be used properly, it may be a great asset to the website.
I recently added this feature to my photographic article site, I use it very sparingly, only activating it on internal links to the articles themselves.
Out articles contain photos so a preview in this case does (I feel) help people decide if the article is for them.
The customer is always right however so we will be asking our community how they feel about the feature and react accordingly.
Hi
I was actually going to install this feature until I was directed by this article and the accessible problems by the web standards group mailing list.
However I do see the benefits of this feature but at the moment I will not be using it. btw I posted my views about Snap on my website.
It completely sucks.. Test it in several browsers.. and you will see. It also influences your template, site. I am sorry to say.
Supposedly ‘Snaps’ are only enabled for external links (meaning those outside of your domain) by default. Their FAQ page tells you how you can have the SPAs enabled on a selective basis, using CSS selectors (http://www.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php#n).
I think this is an excellent time to mention a FireFox extension called NoScript. It allows you to block all JavaScript except for JavaScript from the domains you don’t want to let through. In this instance, people who didn’t like Snap.com’s JavaScript popups would never allow Snap.com’s JavaScript to load. Voila! No more popups when visiting the blogs of people who haven’t turned it off!
@michaelper22
But the javascript behaves strange.. just check with IE, FF and Opera and you see changes..
and you can use those css selectors but than you could have the problem that a site does not validate against w3c.
i like snap too, but with those things i only use it for fun at test places..
screenshot opera, watch the footer links when hovering..
thanks for the tips..
i was just considering of placing snap preview on my site..
but after reading this article..
i guess not!
thanks 😀
Exactly my feelings. I opened my blog and was caught completely off guard. Its something I always hated on webpages and now my blog proudly features it! Well…of course its not exactly my blog because it is hosted on WordPress, but still.
Thank heavens the Presentation options allowed turning this off.
Not only did it interfere in reading and is pathetically slow to load (besides serving no practical purpose), for me (on Firefox 2 and a 256k ADSL) it also refused to go away easily (not usually until it had had its way and loaded completely). How anyone could consider it cool is absolutely beyond me. Its ‘technologies’ like these that turn-off and intimidate relatively newcomers and causal users.
The preview feature is really helpful. There are several hundred comments of WP users asking for it on Matt’s blog. If the reader finds it annoying they can disable it on the options menu. But don’t kill it for those of us that like it!
Tami: I’d like to know how Snap Preview is helpful. You need to be specific with me as I’m dense on this point.
Serious bloggers and blog visitors are expressing a resounding dislike for this feature, so I believe that their voices will win out over the fans of gimmicks. At least I hope.
Fortunately, I had read this post before I checked on another WP blog yesterday. Suddenly the snap had been installed on all WordPress blogs and turned on by default. I knew what it was and knew it could be turned off.
I also left a note at Matt’s announcements blog.
I really think that WP.com needs to consider usability and the bloggers and their readers first, before adding more gews-gaws. At least with themes, the blogger has the choice to enable or disable. This snappy thing was installed by default.
My time, effort, and thought involved into communicating (and that of my readers) is worth more than the effort needed to correct somebody’s clique-centered, hey-we’re-cool assumptions.
This approaches the ethically challenged action taken by another WPMU (daria.be) which one day decided to make all the private blogs publicly accessible (and did not inform the users).
Lorelle: Tami: I’d like to know how Snap Preview is helpful. You need to be specific with me as I’m dense on this point.
Lorelle, I can’t speak for Tami, but I can tell you why I think Snap Preview is helpful. You state, “It doesn’t tell you anything about the content or whether or not it’s worth clicking”. Anything?
While it is true I can’t read all the text on the destination page just from the preview, it isn’t fair to say that I can’t tell anything from the preview. I can get some sense of the site, for example a sense of it’s design sensibility. Many users decide whether they like a page with the first second or two (before hitting the back button if they don’t like it). This “quick reaction” to a page is made before most (if not all) of the text is read. I can get most of this “quick reaction” accomplished by looking at the preview–saving me the time of the click, pageload, evaluation and “back” click I may have gone through otherwise.
So, yes, it is true that I can’t evaluate the page via a preview as thoroughly as I might if I clicked through to the site, but it simply isn’t true that I get no value from the preview.
On the flip side, there are instances when seeing the preview entices me to click through to the site. You provide a perfect example on this page, with the link to Matt Mullenweg’s site. I’m not interested enough to click on that link. However, you could have allowed me to see just what you were trying to illustrate if you had previews activated. And there are certainly times when the preview contains enough information to entice me to click through.
So, for me personally, I feel the previews give me enough information to help me make a more education decision on when to click through, and when not. Also I like the flexibility that is now available via the options in the preview bubble. I can turn the previews off globably, or for a specific site. I can also tweak how long I must hover over a link until the bubble pops up. I like it.
I agree with you…I know how bad this can be, but I like using it on my blog because I link a lot.
thanks for the insight. i had installed this thing on my blog, but after trying out a bit and reading up on it, i decided to get rid of this thing, mostly because of the issues you’ve already mentioned.
Good to know that at least one other blogger on the Web is sane. It’s almost as if people looked at IntelliTXT and said, “COOL! Let’s put this on ALL our links!”
I agree: snap sounds like that stupid card game. Put it on a web site and I’ll never again take that site seriously. OK, I can remove it from my site, and my computer, but if I use someone else’s computer and up snaps, then I’ll feel as if I was wearing someone else’s dirty underwear.
Snap is a good example of something that’s done not because it’s needed or helps, but because it’s *possible*. A horrible, disruptive, negative feature – ugh!
I agree. Snap Preview is obstructive to the users, especially partially sighted users. -1. I’ll be turning this feature off. I think wordpres.com users should have been able to opt-in to this “feature” rather having to opt-out.
Perhaps you should consider dishing out some dough and getting a host and hosting your WordPress so you can have full access to it. By the way, it’s free. I don’t think people who work hard to create this great tool appreciates ingrates who complain about getting free stuff. It’s sooooo simple. Don’t like it? Disable it.
I only came across this “technology” today and have added it to my blog !
I am now waiting for some reader feedback.
So they make me have to opt out? How do they track that, with cookies? So everytime I’m on a different computer or choose to clear out all my cookies (which I happen to do regularly), I have to go opt out again? Yikes! Until today, I thought I was the only one irritated by the snap previews I’ve been seeing.
“Two, how do they turn it off for “only me”?”
It saves a cookie on your computer. I can’t speak to their implementation, but there’s no reason for that info to ever be sent back to Snap—the Snap JavaScript can simply check for the cookie, and if it’s there and says “no”, not run the actual loading of the preview.
Lorelle,
Where do you get your facts from? “…conservative estimate of 25% of web users are visually and physically handicapped”? Obviously you know little about what you write. Don’t you at least read this swill to see if its plausible?
Maybe a nice visual graph of the stats would make it easier for you?
I have posted my opinion as comment earlier in this discussion. This kind of discussion is very fruitful for further innovation. In the meantime we have done some research on this topic but got no final results in the moment. From our research there is a strong indication that a huge/certain amount of users want to have this preview opportunity.
Of course you can not judge the content behind the link with this preview. But you can get relevant information about
– the context (eg the type of the site behind the link (wikipedia, flickr, blog, coporate homepage) or the type of document behind the link (ppt, pdf, zip): what is it where I can go now?)
– quality aspects (eg is the link broken) and
– process aspects (eg is a registration required in the next step).
A lot of functionality. Having a user centric perspective we have made the decision to continue with this service on our corporate website for the moment.
On the other hand the “disturbance argument” is valid, it could be really disturbing. I just have seen the upgrade from Snap reacting on this discussion with the introduction of an option “Trigger: Icon only”. This helps a lot – those who want to get a preview on what is behind the link can get it via the icon, the others can click on the link without a disturbance.
I think that Christian Montoya sums this up beautifully saying this is a bad idea but dumb bloggers love it. And while you’re at it, check Google for Snap Preview and Stupid and you’ll see a lot of people with opinions on this issue.
Not that I’m biased or anything. 😉
Yes, it’s an interesting use of technology, but it is used poorly. By a lot of folks, not just Snap. If they can turn it into something really useful, as others in the same arena have done, then go for it. Until then, it’s a blight on the web.
Simply +1. This Snap thing never ever saw any usability test, and you don’t need to be an expert to say that it’s just counterproductive (and thus “unwise” to use, most of the time).
you can completely kill snap by just adding
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
to your hosts file. this is located in the following directories (depending on the operating system that you are using):
win xp: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
win 2000: c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
Win 95/98 c:\windows
Linux/Mac OSX : /etc
what that hosts entry does is that it redirects *ALL* requests to spa.snap.com to your local machine (and thus it will fail to pull across snap.com’s javascript)
You seem to have a strong opinion about this plugin. You can ask yourself, “Do I maintain this site for myself or for my readers?” If the answer is “myself” then do and preach anything you want. If the answer is “my readers”, then you may wish to consider asking them what they want. Maybe one day, the plugin will allow them each to select their own preference. At that point it really is a non-issue.
Actually, if you reread the article, you will see that the main and most important position taken is from the perspective of a reader. Sure, there may come a day when this implementation may be of benefit. In its current state, it is a hindrance to readers.
Again, if your site offers reviews of web designs, then the visual offerings of this tool may help. If it doesn’t, which is the majority of us, this gimmick doesn’t help your site or blog in any way. It’s a gimmick and causes problems for the visually impaired, unprepared, and the rest of us who now fear and avoid links with our mouse anticipating that nasty thing popping up.
That’s my experience as a reader of other blogs. I’m hearing from a lot of people, and reading their own opinions uninfluenced by mine, that they are also experiencing the same feelings. I’ve read of a few people who say they will not return to a site that uses Snap, their feelings are that strong.
I’m not into that level of ultimatum. I would, however, appreciate that Snap be an OPT-IN plan instead an opt-out. Much better those who want it get it rather than having it forced upon us and then fighting to get it turned off.
Ive read in several places that with SNAP you can turn them off…
Let’s tell the truth. Bill Gross at Idealab [sic] can take his stupid little Snap search engine popup and shove it. So can the f*
I found out that Snap preview was on my blog by default and turned it off straight away. It wasn’t too much of a problem for me, but it was annoying when I was scrolling down the page, accidentally put the mouse over a link and this window suddenly came up over the text! I think it’s something that should be a feature, but disabled by default with the option to turn it on. It suits some blogs, but not most.
And about accessibility, I can’t find any statistics right now, but I know heaps of blind people who use the ‘Net. If people don’t care about accessibility, they should at least realise that they’re limiting their audience. As far as I’m concerned, if they don’t want to make their site accessible to me it’s not a site I want to go to, anyway. I realise that not everything can be made accessible, but some effort should be made to make things as accessible as possible.
Yup, I’ve been hating this feature and just now took it off. Thanks very much. I’m going to keep reading.
I think you could have gotten to the point a little earlier in this post, though.
Snap Preview is just wrong …
So wrong that i blogged about it …
World without Snap Preview …
is a better world …
http://www.subcorpus.net/blog/
I absolutely hate it, and I disabled it inmediately.
I think it’s not a bad idea at all, being able to see what I am going to visit before I decide to click.
If you don’t like it then fair enough, install AdBlock Plus.
Yup, it’s incredibly irritating. Glad I’m controlling my own wordpress installation 😉
Thanks for your recent comments on your blog. After reading your advice in the comment and here, I have decided to completely remove SnapPreview as it does not really serve a function for the readers of the blog.
how about on blogspot??
Wow, you got lots of replies to this one…
I more-or-less agree with you. This feature does have its purpose, but I don’t think that purpose is on blogs. For instance, a website that is all about link lists (like Chainki, or toplists) would find the feature useful, because you can get a little preview, and as you mentioned in a reply to another comment, also lets you know if the link is good or not. (Actually, I think Chainki does use it… can’t remember.)
I personally thought the feature was really nifty when I first saw it, and decided to add it to my blog. I had no issues with it, but decided to remove it because there was actually a link that I didn’t want to give a preview of, and I didn’t feel like going through the effort of changing my preferences on the Snap site. Since then, the content of my blog has become a bit more serious, so it’s just as well.
But, in the right places, it is really quite useful, I think. 🙂
i really hate it as well
I dont like snap preview either… please stop using it wordpress!! – Listen to your users!!!
Thanks.
I don’t like snaps, it make me confused.
And now i knew how to stop it.
I guess I am different to other people because I actually find this feature useful (and yes I agree it does slow things down), but the reason why I find it useful is purely because people lately use “strange” anchored text which helps with SEO, but aren’t useful to readers. I use SNAP preview to judge if I want to following the link.
If you like to understand more about what I mean with anchored text problems, read my blog article regarding the ‘title attribute and SEO’ under the usability category.
Ditto! I HATE SNAP!
I fully agree with you!
What this should do is have the link as a normal link, then next to the link it should say preview, which if you hover over you will get the popup.
That way people aren’t getting unexpected boxes popping up, but if people which to use the feature they still can.
Why doesn’t it work like this by default?
I jump to this page by accident. I was actually looking for “Theme Previewer”…
For me, I don’t find it is useful for any content-solid bloggers. However it is very useful to preview pictures. I must confess that those wordpress-generated thumbnails are too small, and clicking back and forward to “see” a picture is very annoying. Luckily they got it “fixed” on wordpress 2.5. Big thumbs up for wordpress team.
If the plugin can be improved, I said add a special code, like “rel=snap” to Anchor tag and limit it to preview only this link. I might use it on my “Bookmark” page to check for broken links.
There are firefox plugins that give you automatic preview of links you hover over. If you want it (as a user) you can have it, without spam links. For a website it is not a feature, it is no better than popup advertisement and should be treated as such by browsers (blocked).
Thx for the tip on how to disable it on my blog..
I found one useful way to use Snap Preview – for Amazon product links. In the pop-up window you see the details of the product and text is readable. I left Snap Preview for my links exchange page so that visitors can get some impression of the websites listed. Otherwise I agree that it is not a good idea to use it anywhere – just for information that can be readable in the pop-up window.
Does anyone know of a product like snapshots from snap.com that functions the same but doesn’t have ads on it ? I like the product but am worried that users might click on a competitors ad.
@ mrwilliamsburg:
Sorry. I can’t help you. I’m really against anything that pops up on a site without warning and without visitor control, ads or otherwise. The issue under decision is not just aimed at snap preview/snapshots/etc. but anything that interferes with the ability of anyone to read a web page.
I look at this much the same as you do. It is an un-wanted pop-up. It is a distraction with absolutely no positive value to the reader. It is also a marketing gimmick that does nothing positive for the website that gets displayed!
I am really tired of all the misc. total B.S. that ends up cluttering what would be very good content.
I find the Snap Preview interesting at times & sometimes they are irritating. For technical blog it is insignificant & inappropriate . They disturb the reader & it is difficult to concentrate . For meaningful blogs , Snap Preview are real crap .
But some times it is real fun to browse different web sites(PROVIDED ,YOU HAVE SO MUCH FREE TIME )
Thanks for the info, I was considering adding this feature to my blog and after reading your rant I decided against it. I don’t want to hinder my readers in any way!
I do hope you read the rant and appreciation within the comments to get a real feeling for how awful this thing is. They telling the story better than I did. 😀
nice article, thanks friend 🙂
I certainly wish to turn Snap Preview OFF. But I do not find the ‘Presentation” link on my theme. I presume I will have to change themes ?
It is now called “Appearance”.
Your article is very logical indeed. The arguments you brought up are also thorough and reasonable.
I was thinking to add the feature into my blogs, with a hope of improvement.
But after reading your post, I understand that it is a bad idea to do so. So, I will certainly turn off the SNAP Preview right away.
84 Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[…] Concordo con Lorelle sul fastidio causato dall’utilizzo di Snap Preview Anywhere. […]
[…] Just one more proof that just because something is new and “cool” does not mean that it’s necessarily a good thing. […]
[…] Edit: I’ve decided to remove Snap due to this article. […]
[…] Al principio, el concepto de las mini-fotos asociadas con los enlaces me pareció muy bueno. De hecho, este fin de semana iba a implementar ese cambio. Sin embargo, un artículo de Lorelle da muy buenos argumentos en contra de su uso. Además de los típicos sobre el costo en recursos, extra javascript, etc, Lorelle comenta sobre el impacto sobre la legilibilidad de los artículos si una ventana emergente aparece simplemente al mover el ratón. Y ese impacto lo sienten en particular gente con problemas visuales o motrices, que ya tienen suficientes problemas con sitios “normales”. ¿Que dirán nuestros expertos en usabilidad criollos? […]
[…] lorelle agrees. […]
[…] Lorelle VanFossen has written an excellent article on why this feature is bad, and how to turn it off if you have a WordPress.com hosted blog. Thanks, Lorelle! […]
[…] p.s. l’idea nata da Lorelle. […]
[…] Lorelle on WordPress: WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview […]
Howto filter snap in Firefox, di adiós a Snap
In english
Parece ser que después de Bloquear ContentLink con Firefox y hacer recientemente lo mismo con WebSnapr a la gente de WordPress.com se le ha ocurrido utilizar Snap, un servicio similar a Websnapr.
Si usar Snap para los enlaces es malo, lo …
[…] Scusate il rant. Aggiornamento: come Enzo e vox fanno notare nei commenti, anche Lorelle on WordPress ne parla. Mi accorgo che ci sono delle inquietanti affinità tra le opinioni che lei riporta e le mie. […]
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[…] Lorelle on WordPress has a pretty interesting discussion about this new update. Think this gimmick through, folks. Do you really need this bell and whistle on your blog? It’s a nice gimmick, but if you have given people enough information about the link you are offering, isn’t that enough? Do they really need to see a tiny thumbnail view of the page they might visit? You can’t read the text, so what will a little picture tell you? It’s a pretty site, so make sure and visit it? Some of the most valuable sites I’ve found on the web are not pretty. […]
[…] Concordo con Andrea e con Lorelle: la piaga di Snap Preview che imperversa ultimamente sui blog va fermata, è più fastidiosa delle pubblicità pop-up. […]
[…] I wanted to write about Snap since I stumbled over it two weeks ago, but I hadn’t any clear position about it(For all who don’t know what it’s it displays for each outgoing, optionally also for all links, a preview how the site does look). But I got one after I read this article while I read this article I had to agree to each of the stated points. Some of these points against the use of Snap are: -It makes the reading of websites for handicapped people just more complicated as they may not recognize that there popped up a preview for a link and they leave the site as they may think there’s missing some content -it blows your site which makes it slower to load -You can just prevent viewing these previews by opt-out principle on their website -and some more… […]
[…] UPDATE: Along the same lines, Lorelle’s comments on Snap Preview Anywhere is worth a read. I feel the same way about this “feature” that many sites are using. […]
[…] Como si fuera contagioso, Carlos se anduvo tentando con el artilugio pero antes de implementarlo en su terruño decidió hacer algo de investigación, dando con una cruzada muy interesante respecto de porqué Snap debiera ser incluido entre los Jinetes del Apocalipsis. […]
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[…] you heard about Snap Preview Anywhere? It came across my radar when Lorelle wrote an open letter to WordPress.com asking them to stop using it. Here’s the down […]
[…] and more times I was no longer hovering over links because it was just bugging the hell out of me. Turns out I’m not the only one. Now I’m not being as vitriolic as good ol’ Christian (bless […]
[…] the image takes over and this throws the reader out. A few other articles discuss this problem, Lorelle and Planet […]
[…] I wish they would, and apparently I’m not the only one. The somewhat famous WordPress blogger Lorelle sums up my thoughts on Snap previews: “Do they really need to see a tiny thumbnail view of […]
[…] actually paying people a lot of money, or why would wordpress.com think it’s a good idea to enable Snap Preview Anywhere on all wordpress.com blogs? posted January 11th, 2007 at […]
[…] that dreadful thing! I just went through my blog through the eyes of a visitor, and I realised that Lorelle had a good point – ‘remove the darn thing, its a […]
[…] a while. But it looks like not everyone is happy with this. Fellow WordPress.com blogger Lorelle dislikes Snap Preview saying: I’ve also stumbled across these link previews and find them not just annoying and […]
[…] also found this compelling article on why not to use the […]
[…] listening to your comments and especially after reading the article that Jester linked to, I have decided to get rid of the Snap Preview Anywhere function. For […]
[…] Lorelle is one of the main objectors to Snap. She writes, Think this gimmick through, folks. Do you really need this bell and whistle on your blog? It’s a nice gimmick, but if you have given people enough information about the link you are offering, isn’t that enough? Do they really need to see a tiny thumbnail view of the page they might visit? You can’t read the text, so what will a little picture tell you? It’s a pretty site, so make sure and visit it? Some of the most valuable sites I’ve found on the web are not pretty. […]
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Anti-Snap Preview Solutions/A Peace Treaty if you will
I have noticed there is quite an anti snap preview uprising over the last few days. I think there are a couple of things to consider here:
Firstly, nobody is being killed people so take it easy ok?
As long as we’ve cleared up t…
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[…] WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview […]
[…] WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview […]
[…] WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview […]
[…] WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview […]