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Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and unuseful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.
That’s not to say im any better, but it is true. As a group , most bloggers are only a small step away from the flashing, rotating logos of 1997 or the neon pink backgrounds and blaring teen pop auto play bollocks of your average 17yr old MySpace user — and I include myself, though i dont use SPA, im as guilty as the next blogger of “bling envy”.
Let me point out a few truths about Snap Preview Anywhere, in the vain hope that this misguided ‘helper application’ will die a quick death as we all start to see the sense of a usable website as opposed to a trinket magnet for the design challenged.
- Accidental triggers: When scrolling, or just moving from one element (maybe a link, maybe a photo etc) to another, the unintentional triggering of the SPA popup is distracting, at best. It draws the eye away from the task at hand, and causes annoyance, and loss of concentration — if you’re actually selling anything, pay close attention to this point!
- Click stalling: Quite often, when trying to click a link that features the Snap abomination, I have to click several times to get the damn thing to work. This is too much effort. If your site is that hard to use, you can bet I wont be back, and neither will others.
- I trust you: No, really I do! Im at your blog, despite like everyone else being really busy, im at your blog! I just want to follow the fucking link ok? Dont crowd me like some over-eager second hand car salesman trying to sell me a dodgy link, just let me see that its a link, read the anchor text and decide if I want to click it. I dont care what the bloody site looks like, if you’re linking to it, that’s good enough for me — really, get out of my face.
Wow, glad I got that off my chest. I’ve had this post in mind for a few weeks but Duncan reminded me, and finally pushed me in the comments of another post.
All joking aside, SPA is not helpful, it’s not cool, and it’s not winning you readers — It’s bling, a silly little shiney thing designed specifically to increase awareness of Snap.com — no bad thng, and certainly an shining example of how to use widgets to gain links and attention, but, come on ladies and gentleman, show a little self restraint, show a little consideration for your users.
Complaints, abuse and protestations of innocence, ignorance or terminal stupidity to my inbox or the comments below 
You can just go to the options menu in the preview box and set it to go off in 1 sec. no more instant popups unless your really want it to.
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Couldn’t agree more.
When I first saw snap preview thingy on some of the famous blogs I also signed up for it and put it on my own blog, but soon I discovered that I hated the thing because of all the reasons you have mentioned, so aside from removing it from my pages I have also grown a strong distaste for web pages that continue to shove snap previews in my face.
I also believe that SPA craze is very short-lived as more and more of us speak against it. Thanks for venting your frustration and giving us all a chance to vent ours
I completely agree. I wrote a post on this a few days ago. I didn’t come up with the reasons you mention but I mentioned some other reasons not to use snap preview.
I can see Nick’s point here, but I must admit, I like the darn thing. Since I’m the author of my blog, and do a lot of linking, snap is great at verifying those links without actually having to click on them. Reader feedback could change my mind on this, but I suppose I need readers first…
For those who keep saying you can turn them off; it isn’t ideal. If you clear your cookies, use another machine (or another browser), reinstall your browser, or just leave it for long enough the Snap Preview Disabled setting is lost.
Snap Preview should be opt-in, not opt-out. We already learnt that lesson from email.
I encountered snap for the first time on Scobles blog on the day he mentioned his birthday. I was so annoyed that I immediately vented on his blog and blocked all snap content both in Opera and in my hosts file for IE. Ditto intellitext by the way – I don’t see it anymore either.
nailed it.
the multiple-click thing is what kills me. that snap thing is just a total piece of sh*t, and the only reason blogs like TC use it are because they’re getting money from Snap.
I absolutely agree! Thanks Nick. I read with my mouse, so I don’t lose what line i’m on. but I can’t will all the damn windows popping up in my face.
Nick, I’m fully with you — I absolutely HATE them.
You can disable the feature globally also from the pop-up bubble itself. I wrote an entry on it on my blog.
Highly relevant link:
http://jergames.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-disable-snap-preview-anywhere.html
Unfortunately, as most people have noted, this is a) opt-out, and b) only lasts as long as your cookies do.
Haven’t we already learned that people don’t like popups?
Yehuda
You can – go to ‘Presentation’ then ‘Extras’. It’s the only one and can turn it off.
I agree. I am upset that this is rolling out on more and more sites. As a user I am annoyed, and as a designer I know I’m not going to roll this out on anything I work on.
Hello Nick (and Performancing Readers),
My name is Jason Fields, I am Product Evangelist for Emerging Technology for Snap.com and Snap Preview Anywhere blog widget. I wanted to address some of the criticism that has been circulating in the blogosphere about the usefulness of our product.
In a nutshell, our product is intended to enable users to “look before leaping”, saving many people a wasted click. I will however be the first to admit that this is a product that some people don’t like, and this is why we have made sure to include a simple method to opt-out for those who don’t like it (click the ‘options’ menu in the upper right of the preview bubble).
While there are certainly others who agree with some of the comments here, there are literally thousands of people signing up for SPA every day AND we have served more than 100+ million previews since the launch of the product – and all of this for free.
We are improving SPA almost every week with features aimed at giving site owners and end-users greater control in how to implement (and indeed “if” to implement) and interact with SPA. In the weeks to come, we will be:
(1) Making improvements that will reduce the confusion about whether a link is SPA enabled, or not.
(2) Make it much easier for a site owner to point SPA to a particular type of link.
(3) Enabling the site owner to totally customize a link, image, css, etc.
We here at Snap are acutely aware of the issues described in these comments and we have several enhancements scheduled to release over the coming couple of weeks that, in different ways, will address them. Rest assured that your viewpoints have been informing, and will continue to inform, the ongoing development of this product.
If your interested in reading up on why we created and released Snap Preview Anywhere, please check out the recent post on http://blog.snap.com/.
Thanks for your time and attention.
Jason Fields
Product Evangelist, Emerging Technology
http://www.Snap.com
I thought I was the only one! I’ve tripped over one of these too many times, and half the time, I simply cant be bothered to click on it again. Granted, it may serve a useful purpose, but making it easier to turn off would be nice!
I thought it would benefit my readers, but it annoyed them more than anything else. They voted overwhelmingly against SPA. Oh well…lesson learned.
Thank God for that, I thought it was just me.
Finally we can vote to determine where we all stand in this question:
http://www.digg.com/design/Do_you_like_Snap_Preview_Anywhere
Yes you can disable it. Everyone keeps pointing that out. But millions of users out there shouldn’t have to waste time and effort figuring this out. Opt-out always imposes a cost on the user. So I suggest, for those web/blog masters out there that still think this gadget is a good idea, to make it opt in, a setting somewhere, for those users desperate to turn it on. Care to keep track of how many will actually voluntarily want this?
The Bling issue:
Many people’s brains process information differently than you do. While you may have no problem with a text link, there are people who brain tends to process information visually. These are people who remember faces better than names, draw diagrams rather than take notes, and prefer “learn by doing” rather than “learn by reading”. SPA could really help those people out more than it helps out you, especially when a site has a lot of links, or the same page is linked to in many places. That doesn’t make the other usability issues of SPA any less relevant. It’s just that just because you don’t find the thumbnail image useful it doesn’t mean that other’s don’t. It’s quite possibly not “just bling” to everyone, in other words.
Here’s a bit more on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_style
sorry, double post
I admit it is useless,but I’ll still use it.
I totally agree
I tried to OPT-OUT of your damn Snap Preview bullsh*t using the disable link on your page. It doesn’t work. I have now added snap.com & performancing.com permanently to my hosts file redirecting to NULL. I guess that I will have to wait for some sort of adblock extension for IE7 to not have to use these extreme measures. Your “technology” offers NO advantange or wanted feature AT ALL. Any website that intentionally persists in its use (on any machine I happen to use/own) will be a site that I don’t return to.
I recently started blogging, and was having all kinds of problems with my blog. My header picture would not load, or the old header picture would load. In addition, whenever I went to my blog, Safari would appear as if it had loaded my entire page, but on the status bar, it would indicate “http://blah.blah.blah completed 23 of 28″, or 26 of 31. Firefox would also appear to have loaded the entire page as well, but in the lower left hand corner of the window, it would say spa.snap.com. After a little searching, and reading this post, I decided to turn snap off to see if it would help, and all the problems went away. My page loads faster, the image loads every time, and the status bar is clean after the load.
Jason, I have my blog through wordpress.com, and this past weekend, my blog started having problems. My page would appear to load, but the Safari status bar would indicate “completed 23 of 28 or some other set of numbers, and sometimes my header image would not load. In Firefox, the page would apparently load, but in the status bar, it would say spa.snap.com, and again, sometimes my header would not load. I had several friend who emailed me telling me they were experiencing the same problem when trying to view my blog. I tried several other wordpress blogs and found problems on some of them as well.
After a little googling, and reading this post on performancing.com, I decided to try disabling spa on my site, and after i did, all of my problems went away. As a test, I re-enabled spa, and the problems came back.
I do not know whether the problem is with the wordpress implementation of spa, or whether it is with spa itself, but at least for now, my blog is a no-spa zone. I may try enabling spa again in a few weeks or so, but I’ll make that decision when the time comes.
As a beginner to blogging, I am trying a variety of things in order to learn about them. I was encouraged to try Word Press and I really liked it until I was bombarded by what I believed to be some sort of third party heckling and annoyances. Apparently they had to do with insisting that I try “snap” – (I don’t recall exactly, except that it seemed to want to interact with flickr?)- so I “snapped” and quit posting to my Word Press blog until I was willing to take the time to try to figure out if I was doing something wrong due to my naive or uninformed beginner state. For those who are more advanced, it may come as a surprise as to how easily someone can be put off by features they don’t understand. I use examples with steps that I am able to follow in order to successfully learn about new things. I hope that I have posted this correctly as a comment.
Great quote about magpies in a sparkly things factory!
I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don’t want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive.
One person mentioned that all widgets slow down the page load – but this isn’t technically correct. There are a couple ways for a widget developer to delay rendering until after the page is loaded – similar to the way images load after the page is downloaded. I think modern browsers grab images on the fly so the display is faster, but its a similar idea. The trick is for the developer to care enough and be clever enough to do it right. For example, the widget I implemented at Others Online (which is very useful widget for bloggers in general – check it out) draws a simple grey frame then continues with the drawing of profiles after the page is loaded.
Well I am sure that Adsense Click through percentages are higher on sites that use Snap preview. Why ? well most normal links become unappealing.
I found that it’s just not worth the trouble and buys very little for the readers.
I keep a personal blog and came across Snap Preview on other blogs and had the mindset of ‘that’s cool. Others have it on their blogs, so I’ll add it.’ The old bandwagon effect, I guess. Great points though. I’m removing this as of today.
I also use Jiglu, which is starting to get on my nerves. It seems to just pick, at random, what it deems to be keywords in my blog; and it’s nothing really more than another annoyance.
Thanks for bringing this to light!
I found one useful way to use Snap Preview – for Amazon product links. In the pop-up window you see the details of the product and text is readable. I left Snap Preview for my links exchange page so that visitors can get some impression of the websites listed. Otherwise I agree that it is not a good idea to use it anywhere – just for information that can be readable in the pop-up window.
I tried to OPT-OUT of your damn Snap Preview bullsh*t using the disable link on your page. It doesn’t work. I have now added snap.com & performancing.com permanently to my hosts file redirecting to NULL. I guess that I will have to wait for some sort of adblock extension for IE7 to not have to use these extreme measures. Your “technology” offers NO advantange or wanted feature AT ALL. Any website that intentionally persists in its use (on any machine I happen to use/own) will be a site that I don’t return to..
thanks
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I tried to OPT-OUT of your damn Snap Preview bullsh*t using the disable link on your page. It doesn’t work. I have now added snap.com & performancing.com permanently to my hosts file redirecting to NULL. I guess that I will have to wait for some sort of adblock extension for IE7 to not have to use these extreme measures. Your “technology” offers NO advantange or wanted feature AT ALL. Any website that intentionally persists in its use (on any machine I happen to use/own) will be a site that I don’t return to..
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Palestine Students Forum
Snap is absolute crap.
I’ve been avoiding Live Journal etc since it arrived.
It’s a pop up, dress it up how you want but it’s still an UNWANTED pop up – and I don’t want pop ups thankyou.
Anyone who hates it I suggest you go here
http://spacecowb0y.livejournal.com/281574.html?thread=174054
and disable it.
I use IE7Pro which I found through that Live Journal post linked above and have entered all the various urls they’re using to try and inflict their crap on everyone.
Now I can read WordPress and Live Journal without hitting the back button because of Snap.
Great quote about magpies in a sparkly things factory!
I have found the Snap preview to be annoying also. Since I don’t want to criticize widget developers in general, all I can say is that I hope they are able to tune it to be useful without being intrusive
I found one useful way to use Snap Preview – for Amazon product links. In the pop-up window you see the details of the product and text is readable. I left Snap Preview for my links exchange page so that visitors can get some impression of the websites listed. Otherwise I agree that it is not a good idea to use it anywhere – just for information that can be readable in the pop-up window.
Thank God for that, I thought it was just me.
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