On Snap Shots and its imitators

Once upon a time, there was a service called Snap Shots. (It was originally called Snap Preview Anywhere, actually, and only changed its name to Snap Shots when some slightly more useful features — which I will get onto later — were added to it). If a website used Snap Shots, users would — when hovering their mouse pointers over an external link on that website — see a little thumbnail image of the website targeted by the link. A nice idea, don’t you think? A chance for website owners to easily get a preview of what they’ll see when clicking on links. That’s what many people thought, greeting the birth of Snap Shots ecstatically.

But it’s actually a bit of a silly idea. When people visit a website, they tend not to do so not because of what it looks like but because of what that website’s content is. And yet Snap Shots relied on people wanting to visit a website just because of what it looks like — and the fact of the matter is, most people don’t, if you forget about website design galleries.

Some people rightly grumbled that this was stupid. Snap realised this and added useful new features. For example, a link to a website with an RSS feed results in users being shown the latest articles in that RSS feed. Link to a YouTube video and users can watch the video in the Snap Shots floating bubble. Snap also introduced an advertising feature, allowing website owners (and Snap) to earn a bit of money — a less irritating version of those blasted IntelliTXT advertisements.

But people complained about this — turned off mostly by the advertising, and grumbling that the screenshots were accompanied by clutter and stuff. Services like websnapr sprouted up, offering pure thumbnails unaccompanied by the clutter but devoid of the useful features that Snap hastily added to their original service.

websnapr is a waste of time — it sets out to be “Snap Shots without the annoying bits” but it is in fact “Snap Shots without the useful bits” . Don’t bother with it, or the other Snap Shots alternatives. Even Snap Shots itself — the original, and the best — is a bit poo.