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For those who read this blog regularly and for those who don’t, my name is Jason Fields and I am Product Evangelist for Emerging Technology for Snap.com and the Snap Preview Anywhere (aka SPA) blog widget. I’d like to respond to some recent criticisms in the blogosphere about various aspects of SPA. Please continue to let us know what you think about Snap.com and SPA via our blog comments and official feedback forms. 1. First off, thanks to all for writing comments. The fact that people took the time to assess SPA is appreciated and, most importantly, their opinions will be helpful in shaping the future development of SPA. As you may already know, 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; and (3) Allow the site owner to totally customize a link, image, css, etc. We are committed to making SPA a useful feature for both the site owner and end user. 2. SPA was invented because our search engine experience shows that visual previews can be very helpful to users. While we’re hopeful, of course, in increasing awareness and ultimately trial of Snap.com, we invented SPA because we believe that people really do appreciate the “look before you leap” benefit that visual previews provide. That’s why our core product, the snap.com search engine, is based almost entirely on the user experience created by the visual presentation of results, versus the 10 blue links of most search engines. We believe that visual previews of sites can provide a very quick scan of the quality of the link and the relevance of the site to your goals. Admittedly, SPA is not equally useful for all types of links, which is one reason why SPA’s default setting is just for external links, and not internal ones. 3. Accidental triggers. Sometimes SPA bubbles are accidentally triggered and this can be an annoyance. We’ve found this to be especially true of those who use their cursor to read (as people have commented here and elsewhere). We’ve been experimenting with various ways to ease this problem, from decreasing the link’s sensitivity to better labeling the link as a SPA-enabled link (ex. by using an icon). Yet, I’m afraid that accidental triggering will never be totally eliminated, but we’re working hard to reduce its occurrence holistically. One example of this is in our ‘Options’ menu where end users can set the hover delay. 4. SPA is absolutely free and voluntary. SPA is a service we provide to the blogosphere in the hope of getting more people to try Snap.com. While there are certainly others who agree with some of the negative assessment, 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. Thanks again to all of you out there that have taken the time to write about how to improve (even remove!) SPA. We here at Snap are acutely aware of the issues described in the blogosphere. Rest assured that your viewpoints have been informing, and will continue to inform, the ongoing development of this product. Jason Fields |
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Your research may indicate that previews are useful in search results, but was it applicable to websites where users may not be looking for their next link and as you say are just scrolling around a site?
I personally don't see the value of the previews, particularly in a broadband world where there is no time lost from visiting a site. I don't see how having a small thumbnail helps, as you can't read the content in a thumbnail……
interessante lösung - denke über einen einstzt nach ;)
I am new to Blogging and as part of my learning process I came across this utility. I find it useful to keep readers on the page and although broadband means one can load a link fast these days ,it is still faster to just do a quick mouse over of a list of links and makes it easier to return to a particular link. There is an added element of security as well. It is easy to see at a glance if the site is what the link says it is. If the preview interferes with reading the page it can easily be disabled for that site or globally by the visitor. I love it
Chris
http://treetopsdailydiary.blogspot.com/
Snap distort scome cyrillic (specific ukrainan) letters
See example at
http://perohanych.wordpress.com/2007/02/03/snap-distort-letters/
perohanych: Thanks for the report. We have fixed the problem and are currently re-crawling.
We use snap preview at www.contentXXL.de for external links. I like it very much, but I will remove it - because it transfers about 20 KB none cached java script during every page call. You can analyze this using fiddler.
Please think careful about cache settings or calling conventions that are working with every browser (IE7 in my case).
Frank
Jason,
To be honest, it does get in the way a lot - but I've seen the solution. On TechCrunch snap preview is anchored to a little bubble (cloud?) not the full URL. How can I replicate it?
Thanks.
Hm, I almost missed it: you have the same bubbles, but here both the url and the bubble brings up the preview, whereas on TechCrunch only the bubble - less accidental triggering:-)
I like the idea (and use it) but also don't want it in my face all the time - I suspect that's the same problem TechCrunch are trying to solve. I'm not sure where to go with it, will probably ask the readers what they want and if it's annoying then I'll remove it.
The amount being cached doesn't bother me … maybe it should
Jason, First of all, I do not know whether the problems I experienced this weekend are in the wordpress implementation of spa, or whether the problems are with spa itself, but at least for now, my blog is a no-spa zone.
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 friends email me saying they were experiencing the same problem when trying to view my blog. I tried several other blogs with spa and found problems on some of them as well.
After a little googling, and reading a post and comments on www.performancing.com, I decided to try disabling spa on my blog, and after i did, all of my problems went away. As a test, I re-enabled spa this morning, and the problems came back.
I may wait a few weeks and try enabling spa again, but I'll make that decision when the time comes.
One of the things that irritates me from a users standpoint is that if there is a link in a post, and as I'm scrolling my mouse pointer happens to land on that link, many times I can't scroll again until either the preview loads or I move my pointer off of the area of the link. And even sometimes after that, I can't scroll until the spa pane has disappeared.
From my perspective, spa is not yet ready for prime time.
@ Richard S,
Thanks for the report. I know we had some network issues late last week but as far as I know these have been resolved. I will forward your note re: load performance to relevant teams. They may send you an email with a few clarifying questions.
Re: you final point on accidental triggering of the preview bubble while scrolling… this is something we addressed almost 2 months ago by implementing logic that would temporarily disable the Snap Preview script while detecting scroll-wheel activity. I'm curious if this is due to you script not loading properly (as you describe in your comment) or if this is more a general comment re: the interaction… You wouldn't happen to experience the over-agressive display while on a laptop and using the arrow keys to scroll, would you?