I’m sure you’ve seen Snap previews before. You must have! According to Snap, over 500,000 blogs and websites use this service. The pop-out previews are meant to be a tool that will give readers the chance to “preview” the sites that you’re linking to without having to leave the site. In the end, it’s supposed to save reader’s time by helping them decide if they want to click on a link. For me, it just seems to slow everything down! There’s nothing worse that pop-outs, even if it’s not an advertisement.
A lot of the sites that I read regularly use it, and I think it’s just one of those trends that bloggers are wanting to get in on. Everybody wants on the bandwagon. I can tell you this much, CyberNet will probably never implement this. It’s just one of those things that gets under my skin. I thought I was standing alone on this one until I came across this article this morning.
Yes, I’m not the only one that finds Snap highly annoying, and there’s even a way to disable it! Snap creators themselves have posted a very simple way to get rid of the pop-out previews. They’ve created a cookie to download that will disable all of the pop-outs. Just click here to download that cookie, or you can visit the Snap website and do it from there as well. Remember, if you clear your cookies, you’ll have to go back and download the cookie again.
As I was reading through the comments on the same topic over at Lifehacker, I noticed that a commenter “barron” says that you can now set CCleaner (free system optimization and privacy tool) to keep specific cookies so that you won’t ever have to worry about losing a cookie that you use regularly. This would prevent you from having to download the snap cookie every time your cookies get cleared. I haven’t tried this for myself, but it sounds pretty useful.
So, good-riddance to Snap previews. I’ve disabled it, and now I’ll be a happy camper. Any opinions regarding this? Is it more useful, or more of an annoyance?
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I never liked it either…If I’m going to take the time to try and decipher a tiny thumbnail, I might as well just click on the link.
lots of talk and comments over at nick wilson:
http://performancing.com/node/5721
and snap is a nasty bit of work, interesting comment by robert nagle over at downloadsquad.com:
” 6. This functionality should be a totally client-based solution. But as I understand it this is a feature that lingers on the server pages–and cannot be turned off. I deactivated the wordpress plugin for snap and then removed the files altogether–and the damn thing didn’t turn off! (eventually we had to comment out the code). This is totally uncool!
It added an extra hour or two to a web server migration I did last week.”
do not put it on your blog, it will hurt your readership.
I just installed it yesterday and dig it. I must be a bandwagon jumper, tho the only site I’ve seen it on was Tech Crunch. No harm in having it that I can see, plus, it’s just a really cool tool. I would suggest to anyone that uses it to turn off the internal link previews. Once I did that, unless I moused over external links - I couldn’t tell anything different about the page.
Discussions about this plug-in are constantly going on all over the Web, and there are many people who don’t like it but also some that do like it. I think a lot of sites who decide to use it should run polls on their own site to determine whether users will like to have this feature enabled.
Thumbnails are nice when doing searches but thumbnails for links are a bit of a waste. If I’m interested in an article odds are I’ll click on the relevant links in it. I don’t need to preview it.
BTW, not to be picky, but CCleaner has had the cookie save feature for a long time. It’s just been hiding under options.
Thanks for pointing that out
As I mentioned.. I haven’t actually used CCleaner myself. I saw that in the comments of Lifehacker and thought it was a nice feature to have, and one that people might benefit from. Nice to know it’s always been there.
Nobody likes Browster? I like this mouse-over preview for FF & IE.
I too find those pointless. If he talks about the website as interesting, I’ll click. If I’m curious I’ll click. A 1 inch thumb nail just gets in the way of the content. I’ll def never put this on my blog
I’ve never understood any reason to have such pop-ups like the snap previews or advertisements that do the same thing. It drives me so crazy when browsing the web, that I’ve actually blocked websites that use it, or just never visit them.
It’s a useless tool, that has no practical purpose for implementation. Not only does it slow things down, it’s glitchy at times, and find myself wanting to close the pop-up previews, and having absolutely no way to do it, leaving me with no way to read content that it covers up.
TechCrunch uses it, and it’s the only site that I view on a rare occasion that does. (No, I don’t like the site, I only visit to see his idiotic takes on news stories. I hate the site and Michael Arrington with a fuming passion, as he’s the most irresponsible, egotistical, arrogant, ignorant blogger I’ve ever seen. He sources information poorly, takes information significantly out of context or spins it, he takes valid news stories from other bloggers, and promotes it as something he was the first to discover, and from what I can tell seems to be paying a digg to submit and promote his content.)
Thanks for this workaround btw!
Your welcome Curtiss! I figured I wasn’t the only one that would find it useful
Oh… and your rants make me laugh sometimes
Haha, thanks….I do tend to go off on passionate tangential rants, glad they are amusing.
btw…this workaround has gotten me to start viewing sites I refused to because of the snapshot feature. I love how such simple tips, can have really wide-reaching effects (opening me up to new sites and content).
Now if I could only do the same thing for those equally pesky advertisements that pop-up in the same fashion over specifically linked words.
Actually, the thing I’m the most surprised with is that Websites don’t offer some quick way to disable these Snap previews. Sure some people may like them, but I don’t think it would be many. This is just a hunch but I have a feeling that TechCrunch uses them because there is probably something in it for them (maybe money?). TechCrunch is essentially advertising the service so I would guess that they’re getting a kickback from it.
Ryan, I’d definitely agree, I can’t say for certain about much of their activities….but based on patterns in their posts and marketing, etc….I’m fairly certain they not only get paid for things like the snapshot feature, but furthermore from the sites they promote, and I’m about certain they pay or have connections with a certain top digger to submit their content and have it promoted on digg.
Things like intentionally stealing original content from bloggers and purporting it as his own discovery, without giving credit. A great example is how he stole content from a blog post I submitted about the discovery of http://www.diggriver.com taking it for his own discovery, having a top digger submit it as a dupe and trying to selfishly promote his stole blog post over the original. (The fact that he tried to dupe me doesn’t bother me personally…it’s that he intentionally stole content, purported as his own discovery without sourcing, then uses top digger to promote his content):
Original: http://www.digg.com/tech_news/.....le_Devices
Stolen Dupe: http://www.digg.com/tech_news/.....Dave_Winer
the original link blog has since been taken down…but if you follow the comments in both submissions it tells the tale pretty well. Michael Arrington will do anything to get ahead in the blogosphere, no matter how he has to do it. Even if it means using the most irresponsible, tool on digg to do it, as this is the worst digger I’ve seen on digg(to list all the reasons would require another rant in and of itself
).