Snap Hosted on ZooomrOk, so the overwhelming consensus when I took Snap off my blog a few weeks ago was that I should keep it off. I always liked it and a few other Thomas Hawk readers liked it, but the majority of people did not seem to like them.
So Snap came back with a new design for their links service and I’m going to give it another try. Under the new system in order to get a Snap window to pop open you actually have to purposely hover over a little tiny text bubble next to the link. I think that this will take care of the accidental pop ups that annoyed people so much before.
Feel free to chime in with your opinion on the new Snap and if you still find it obtrusive or if this version is a little more bearable. Either way I’m going to keep this new version on for a few weeks because I like it but will then evaluate continued feedback after that about whether I should keep them on or off.
Also note that if you really still hate the Snap feature you can disable it for both this site or any site by clicking on the little options button in the upper right hand corner of the Snap pop up window.
If anyone has any suggestions about how Snap could work even better please feel free to leave them in the comments.
I like the new options to disable it. I guess we all get what we want, Thomas.
I have permanently blocked snap.com via IE7Pro and FireFox Adblock Plus – it and performancing.com are annoying in the extreme.
Thomas, I think this is a better alternative to the previous setup. I personally don’t find it very useful though – at least for me. I have heard of others that really like it. Just a matter of personal preference I guess.
I initially found the snap previews to be neat, but I quickly grew tired of them. I like the idea of showing the page your linking too, but I think I’d rather control the preview. So I think your solution covers those that like them and those that do not very nicely.
Cooliris is soooo much better to use from the readers end –
http://www.cooliris.com/Site/index.html
I still don’t see the value. The popup is way too small to be of any use. And if I wanted search, why would I hunt out a popup when I have a way better search available in google. I guess they are less intrusive now, but still seem to be trying to fill a gap where there is none.
I’ve disabled ’em, so it doesn’t matter a jot to me 🙂
I disable all ads, “revenue content” crud and such. It’s a waste of bandwidth and effort for all parties, IHMO.
This is definitely a better alternative, although I agree with the others: I dont find them useful in the slightest.
I like it. Thanks for putting it back. Tried Cooliris but it sucked.
Snap could be better if they could make make the pop-up animation a bit more elegant like OS X genie style.
Thomas – I was was one of the ones who complained (loudly, I think) about how awful it was before.
I must admit that it didn’t occur to me that you could disable it, and when I finally did read that you could you had turned them off. Even then I went to their web site to figure out how, but gave up looking for the instructions after five minutes of digging.
Anyway, IMO the new method is vastly superior. I actually like the idea of having the option to easily select a pop-up view (and not having it forced upon me).
So far so good. Good come back by the snap team.
Wow, great idea to include obtrusive, non-accessible content in an otherwise decent blog.
High five!
I’m like others, I found it annoying and honestly don’t see the value. Since we’ve heard what people don’t like, could someone that does share with us what value it adds?
I will say the new icon decreases its annoying value greatly. One of the things that I still find annoying is that it’s applied to every link on the page, even the “post a comment”. Since it’s applied shotgun style it detracts from the few pages where it might be useful.
I like the new Snap previews! I say keep’em!
I just adblocked ’em because I found them annoying. No muss, no fuss. Them as wants ’em can have ’em.