Can someone please explain why Snap.com’s Preview Anywhere is a useful feature? People are adopting it in droves, so I must be missing something. To me, there are two major drawbacks which make the feature not worth any of the benefits.

First off, by the time I have moused over a url, I have already decided to click it. Blogs that have enabled Snap create, what I believe to be, a huge usability issue. The problem goes something like this.

1. I place my mouse over the link in order to click it.
2. Just as the browser is about to load the new page, a square box flashes in the corner of my eye.
3. My brain says “what the…”
4. The new page loads.
5. I click the back button to see what that square box was.
6. I mouse over the link and see a sreen cap of the new page I just left.
7. I click on the link again to return to the new page.

Secondly, it would be useful if I could get a preview of the actual content I am being directed to. That would be… um… fresh. But getting a screen cap of the look and feel of the site with outdated content from the last time Snap took a snapshot is… not so useful. As I mentioned above, I have already decided to click the link. This decision was mostly based on my trust in the source (i.e. the author) who has pointed me to a particular page. Is a screen capture of the site really going to cause me to second guess the author’s suggestion?

Now that I think about it, this would be an extremely useful invention for email. Sometimes I get strange spammy sounding emails from my friends and if I could preview the link in that context I would love the feature. But as implemented in blogs and other trusted sources, this feature seems intended to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.

As an aside, “free preview” cracks me up. I assume Snap means that the tool is free to bloggers to provide previews. But I always read it as they are providing me with a “free preview” of a website, which is, of course, already free.

Update: Brad Feld mentions that Snap claims to have over 40,000 users. Despite that, Feld decided to remove Snap from his blog and AskTheVC. Fred Wilson threatened to remove the feature a week ago, but hasn’t pulled the trigger as of this morning.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2007 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Blogging, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.