Snap Previews Re-Revisited
I have entertained quite a bit of discussion on the Snap Preview Anywhere functionality for the site here. All the feedback has been highly valuable, both for myself as the guy who runs the site, as well as for the Snap folks who are monitoring the sites that use the technology.
I want to thank each and every one of you for offering up your honest and helpful thoughts. Based on your feedback, I have a pretty good idea where I plan to go with the use of SPA. However, I have one last request for everyone, before the decision is finalized.
In response to feedback from users, the good folks at Snap have developed an enhancement to Snap Preview Anywhere which adds a very small icon to SPA-enabled links. The implementation on jarkolicious.com is such that the link text is no longer the trigger for the preview; hovering the small icon on the right of the link text will display the preview as opposed to the link text.
The basic idea is to offer a visual cue to denote which links are SPA-enabled, thereby effectively eliminating the potential “surprise element” and drastically reducing the number of instances of “accidental triggering.”
I have been asked to help “sneak preview” this enhancement, and thought it would be prudent to help the good folks at Snap out. This gives you a chance to offer your input on the updated implementation. More than likely, this will be the final trial of Snap Preview Anywhere here on jarkolicious.com, so I would appreciate any last thoughts that you may have.
At the moment, I have only modified the code so that SPA-enabled links within blog entries are using the enhancement. The links on the site that are outside of the blog posts may still use the “old” SPA functionality for the time being. Based on the overall feedback of both the updated and “old” functionality will determine the path that I take with the implementation here on-site.
So, with all that said, what are your thoughts on the enhancements? Better, worse or more of the same? Keep or remove?
Update: There appears to be a known issue with the icon display and Safari. The issue is being worked and will be fixed soonest.
I think it’s better with the little icon after the link!
It’s better with the smaller icon, but it is still annoying, for me.
Maybe it is something I have to get used to.
This is certainely an improvement, but I really don’t find these useful in any way. They’re too small to read any text, and I don’t need a little preview window to decide if I’ll click a link.
Yeah, even with the icon they’re still annoying.
Personally, I don’t see the point in the whole concept - I don’t visit sites for their look (well, sometimes I do, but that’s when that is my intention) so the preview doesn’t help there, and I generally know if I’ve visited a site by the URL itself rather than the image - I’ll mouseover a link and check the URL in the status bar.
In my opinion, a feature like this should be something at the client end rather than on sites themselves - that way people that want it can have it, and those that don’t, don’t have to.
I agree with Karrde’s idea of this being more of a user’s choice, rather than a site’s choice, even with the new icon feature. I personally still don’t like it for the reasons I stated in my last comment: it leads one to believe that the visuals of a website are all that is important.
Overall is a great improvement. I still don’t have a huge use for it, as I personally don’t think judging a site based on its looks says anything about the information it contains.
But the icon is a very good improvement to the system.
There’s an icon? (Firefox on a PC here.)
Like I said in the first post about Snap and the feedback I have given to the people at Snap — I like the problem they are trying to solve, but this solution is not the one.
If anyone can figure out how to add relevance to external links so people can figure out whether the link is worth visiting, then they really might be on to something. Perhaps query a bookmark or social database such as del.icio.us, digg, ma.gnolia or whatever, to figure out whether the link is popular or has been popular in the past.
Snap’s current solution to solve this problem by showing an image tells me nothing other than an impression of the design. Perhaps another idea is to look at the page you’re linking to for the word or similar words to the word you used to link it to, then grab a snippet or paragraph surrounding that word.