Am I the only person who hates Snap Preview?
You know, that little JavaScript thing that a frightening number of sites have installed these days, which causes little content-free previews to pop up in tiny windows whenever you move your pointer over linked text?
Hmmm. I guess I’m not the only one.
It’s bad enough that the previews make your page load more slowly, sometimes completely stalling the page load. It’s bad enough that the so-called previews are so small that they’re essentially useless: depending on the destination site, you might be able to read the headline text, and you might not. (I can see the add-on’s value in warning people not to click over to giant naked pictures at work, maybe.)
But yesterday marked the second time I decided not to send traffic to a blog because the annoyance of the effort to highlight a particular sample of text, interfered with when the popups popped up, overruled my desire to copy and paste said text.
They are bling. They might serve to spice up a blog post that is otherwise uninteresting. I tend not to read such blog posts. I read stuff that’s interesting, and as I’ve mentioned recently I tend to appreciate more thoughtful fare, running up against the limitations of the medium with its inherent disincentives toward concentration. Additional, unwanted activity on the monitor makes that concentration all the harder. To distract the reader with no real result? A postage-stamp-sized “preview” of the destination web site, which tells the reader basically nothing about the destination site other than whether or not it’s one they already visit so often that they’d recognize it at 20 by 20 pixels? Not helpful.
I’m not the kind of person who goes around the web with JavaScript disabled, but these things make me come damned close.
Look at it from the ADA perspective, which coincides with the ADD perspective. In enabling Snap Previews on your site, you are setting up an unnecessary obstacle to people with a particular suite of disabilities of the attention span nature. We want to read your page, otherwise we wouldn’t be there long enough to have our mouse pointers inadvertently roll over one of your painstakingly crafted links. And then a shiny thing pops up! For people with my particular brain chemistry, you might as well have entitled your post “Better Content Elsewhere.” There’s a reason that, say, Juan Cole doesn’t intersperse his serious, cogent analysis of Middle East history and politics with rows of dancing hamsters:
Someone should please tell Cheney that his own government captured documents in Iraq that show that Saddam’s security forces were a) afraid of al-Qaeda and Zarqawi and b) were trying to capture him once they heard he was in Iraq. The pdf link in my posting on this shows the APB Iraq put out for Zarqawi and the wanted poster.
I don’t know why this information hasn’t percolated up to Cheney or why the US press doesn’t call him on his ridiculous assertions that are contradicted by clear documentary evidence in USG hands.
I challenge any of you to find me a Snap preview that contains more useful information than the above intensely annoying graphic. Except, of course, for the “whether this is a site I already know well” piece of information, which Snap refers to as a “trusted site.” If you feel your readers are more likely to click over to a site they already know well, and you’re one of those bloggers who thinks there are a lot of blogs that don’t get enough attention and some that get too much, installing Snap Preview works counter to your ideals.
The worst thing about the pop-ups? They’re opt-out, rather than opt-in. A courteous software company would have had the decency to allow consumers to decide whether or not to use their product. Stumbleupon’s toolbar? Opt-in. Google Update? Opt-in. Email-ad companies who use an opt-out strategy are rightly considered the spawn of Satan. You can turn the previews off by going here. You can also, theoretically, turn the things off by examining the popups carefully, clicking “options,” and following the instructions. This is insufficient. If you’re going to have Snap Preview enabled on your site, you at a bare minimum should provide information on how to turn the damn things off. That’s if you want to be only forgivably inconsiderate. A baseline standard of courtesy would involve having the software enabled but turned off, with a way for users to turn the previews ON if they want to.
Of course if you have a WordPress blog, that isn’t really possible. You had Snap Preview turned on by default when Wordpress and Snap reached the appropriate corporate agreement. You’ve got to dig around in your settings to turn it off. It’s an inconvenience to you as blogger and reader. Sucks all around.
But turn them off. Please.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Blogging
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