Patrick April 17th, 2007
Search engine Snap.com continues to seek innovative ways to distinguish itself from the competition. Last November, they introduced a service called Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) that allows website owners to display static previews of external sites referenced in links. Appearing as normal links on a website, the Snap.com previews are displayed in small rollover layers. While an annoyance to some (as I observed in some recent usability tests), these previews have been pretty popular, “taking off like a rocket” according to Snap’s own blog, with 1 million website installations and 9 million daily views. The service also appears to be helping Snap increase traffic to its search engine through its integrated “Search the Web” function embedded in each rollover preview.
Yesterday, Snap relegated SPA to an also-ran,making it but one of eight initial Snap Shots, an enhanced version of the service. Snap Shots are similar in functionality (rollover previews of content referenced in a link), but are far more precise in delivering contextual content. Instead of simply showing the preview of a site–which is now handled by PreviewShot (formerly SPA), Snap Shots feature more detailed content, like Wikipedia entries, stock quotes for publicly traded companies, and film industry details from IMDB. Some are more interesting than others, like the PhotoShot, which displays a single photo from a Flickr photostream plus Previous and Next controls.
If Snap can scale the number of Snap Shots available, this service has promise.
- It could potentially provide users with far more useful information, which may mitigate some of the annoyance or hassle factor. But website owners need to be careful not to overdo it; I’ve visited pages on which its impossible to move my mouse without invoking SPA.
- Like SPA, said useful information is provided contextually as a link in the text, rather than in a sidebar widget or some other format. This helps draw users attention and should increase the quality of content views.
- Also as with SPA, users can search the web directly from the rollover, if they have any interest in using Snap as their search engine.
- Website owners can reduce the amount of visual clutter on their pages that is often the direct result of the proliferation of widgets. (This is a topic I’m addressing in a post that’s taking way too long to write.)
Snap has made a few interesting choices with this new service, particularly the branding of the first few available Shots (in Snap parlance). As mentioned above, PhotoShot is specifically a Flickr Snap Shot, as “www.flickr.com” is included in the syntax for “calling the shots.” (If they didn’t or aren’t planning to use this phrase for marketing purposes, they should.) Why not Flickr Shot? It would seem that both Snap and Flickr would benefit from the brand associations. Or did Flickr simply get in early enough to claim the rights to the generic PhotoShot trademark? Or even pay for its rights? The same could be said for their other initial Shots as well. Another intriguing branding choice: “Snap Shots” uses a character space as a separator, which the sub-brands are mashed together to create one word with two initial caps.
At first glance, its hard to tell whether the URL structure for ProductShot can include affiliate links, which would ostensibly be a financial benefit for the provider ecosystem: site owner > Snap > Amazon. And while StockShot can be configured to display data from a wide variety of sources, the others appear to be limited to one source only. Its also not entirely clear whether Snap will control the development of all Snap Shots or will open the platform to external contributors. While Snap offers a Snap Shots Markup Language (SSML) for “hand coding,” a cursory review of the whitepaper appears to address only a limited amount of customization. Of course, PreviewSnap can display a preview of just about any site, but it has the same limitations that Snap acknowledges simply by releasing Snap Shots.
Publishing Snap Shots appears to be essentially the same as it was for SPA, and is supported by some of the most popular blogging platforms through plugins. And it has a page-based configuration tool to customize Shots with frame colors, presentation and interactivity (link, icon, both), logo, and size of preview, plus several advanced options for turning on or off search, internal links, external links, and all non-PreviewShots.
So will Snap Shots assist users in their quest to find what they want to find? Will they increase the value of a site through contextual content and interactivity? Will they drive traffic to Shot content providers or to Snap itself. Time will tell. But where I see a lot of similarity in widget delivery methods, this is an interesting, innovative approach at least.
Technorati Tags: widgets, Snap, Snap.com, Snap Shots, Snap Preview Anywhere