Snap and Twitter on the wind
I am undecided whether I like these Snap popups just yet, they seem a cute way of showing a preview, an indicator of what you get once a link is clicked on, they might well be a passing fad but I decided to try them on for size, just hover over a link on this page like this one to see the effect.
I stumbled across Snap the other day from a link on Twitter which in itself has fast become the internet’s new fad. It is an addiction based on a simple premise of asking “what are you doing?” time ordered independent thought patterns.
When I was at university I used to have over a hundred people on msn, some of whom I had technically lost contact with. I still cared about them and wondered what they were up to but I never got around to messaging them. So the way I kept up to date with their life was through their msn names. I found nearly all of my contacts would change their names regularly.
At first I thought Twitter was like this, independent murmurings completely unconnected. It was only natural of course though that communication would happen.
Its been really fun and completely different to any other interaction online, its not a forum or a chat, occasionally its independent eg ‘Natalie is cooking dinner’, often its in response to things other people have said. There’s drama and excitement but all the posts still have to generally stand alone, people on your contact list might not have everyone else listed. The ambiguity and half conversations make for part of the fun.
I thoroughly recommend trying it soon, before the wind changes and it goes out of fashion.
Hmm… which one are better ? Snap or WebSnapr ?
i think Snap is much quicker on taking the screenshot, but how do you think bout that ?
qureyoon - November 24th, 2006 at 11:11 pmSnap appears to be faster to deploy than the Websnapr preview bubble, yeah it also appears to be moderately faster at taking the screenshot though I haven’t tried it so it may well cache the image well.
Websnapr itself is an api not a preview bubble, and as such has much different uses, very sweet little service that! you can call it by giving it a url in the form ‘http://images.websnapr.com/?url=url&size=size‘
natbat - November 25th, 2006 at 2:04 amI gotta say that I really disliked the ‘Snap’ pop-ups while I was perusing your site. They are much more of an annoyance, than any sort of benefit. Hope this ‘fad’ passes quickly. I can put up with tooltips as long as they are nicely designed and provide additional USEFUL information. I don’t believe that the ‘Snap’ pop-ups provide any advantages in deciding whether to click or not. They could be very useful in the right situation, however they are not very useful when used just to provide a screenshot for every hotlink on your page(s).
Richard Kooistra - November 27th, 2006 at 9:14 amI also would agree. These popups are extremely annoying. If anything they hinder the overall usability and user experience of your site which aside from snap is very elegant.
Rez - November 28th, 2006 at 2:57 pmFair comments, consider them gone - they anoyed me too!
natbat - November 28th, 2006 at 4:08 pm