While reading through a webpage or a blog, your cursor passes by a link to a website. Then a pop-up came giving you the actual screen shot of a website. These pop-ups are technically called web previews. Instead of clicking on the website suggested, visitors interested in the site can have the glimpse of the specific link. This definitively benefits bloggers who wanted to write more than just their personal problems but actually want to show a website or two to their readers. With web previews, everything you see in the internet might also be seen by your readers.
There are currently two known sites that offer this type of service. Even though activating their usage is somehow different from each other, the end result is still the same: you get to have a preview of the link bloggers and webmasters suggested.
Cooliris.com – Cooliris.com is a Firefox extension you can easily install in your Firefox browser. The application can be used solely through Firefox extension but considering the number of Firefox users nowadays; it’s one extension that has gained acceptance in the internet world. Once Cooliris is plugged to your Firefox, any link that your cursor hovers at will generate a preview. Webmasters don’t have to do anything in this account. Cooliris will do everything for the user. As long as the add-on in Firefox is activated, it’s going to generate a preview.
Snap.com – Snap links on the other hand are generated by webmasters. Snap provides a small script that even an amateur webmaster can add to the link. The functionality of Snap is not only limited in Firefox or in any other web browsers. Once the script is added to the link, the web preview will be sure to pop-out once the cursor hover the link.
The main difference between two services is who activates the web preview. Cooliris is a Firefox extension that can be switched on and off by the user. If I am a visitor to a website and I want the web previews, I can just go to the control panel of Cooliris and switch on the service. On the other hand, Snap is used by webmasters. Once the script is installed nothing will switch that off. As long as the cursor is on top of the link, the preview will be generated. But instead of just using Firefox to show the web preview, the previews will be generated whatever browser a user has.
Unfortunately, web previews are sometimes annoying to most users. It has existed for quite sometime now but it didn’t really gained any support from webmasters and Firefox users. But it’s one cool feature for all Firefox users who just wanted to try them out for the heck of it. It’s not really recommended for those who have slow internet connection most of the time; your connection will be concentrating on downloading previews instead of the actual content. For webmasters, it may be a good option if you don’t want to give your users a separate screenshot. Just make sure there’s not much Snap links in your site because it could be really annoying.
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Just FYI, Snap have now launched browser addons as well. There’s also our addon Interclue (currently only available for Firefox) that offers a much more personalizable set of previews that work on .txt, .mp3, .mov, as well as providing the best ordinary old page previews in the business. We’ve been working on it for a long time but we came out well after the others because we didn’t have a lot of resources to throw at the problem and we also wanted to do it right from the beginning.
Comment by Seth Wagoner — October 4, 2007 @ 1:01 am