When we launched Snap Previews Anywhere an Internet eon ago, we quickly realized that as helpful as previews were, most pages from a site offered similar visual information. (Previews of every page on Wikipedia, Amazon, Flickr etc. were virtually indistinguishable.) As a result, in the spring of 2007 we raised the bar and released Snap Shots ™ which included “Rich Shots” that provide much more information to the user as well as increased interactivity. We started with 7 Rich shots including the popular WikiShot and kept adding when we saw specific opportunities to improve the user experience such as the TechCrunch CrunchBase Shot. As a fallback when we did not have a Rich Shot we still offered the original PreviewShot which is essentially a photo of the web page.

That is now changing; Snap is retiring the PreviewShot as our engineers have developed a scalable system that automatically creates Rich Shots for virtually any web page.

So now Snap Shots of any web page, such as the below example of a link that points to a post on Gigaom's Tech blog, will become All Rich Shots in which information is presented in a much more usable manner with key metadata and text excerpts so you will be able to grok more information faster.

We will be rolling out the beta of All Rich Shots in phases. Today you can already see them in action on TechCrunch.com. As with any radical change in a service there will be some rough edges so we look forward to your feedback to help improve All Rich Shots.