Feb

10

Pop-ups 2.0?

Filed Under Web/Tech 

 

After some mighty raving against pop-up ads for the last few years by techies, bloggers and other ‘netizens’, with some degree of success, it is now the Web 2.0 crowd that’s committing a similar crime.

>Snap_techcrunch

Alec has a deliciously snarky post about the Snap plugin that embeds a screenshot preview under every link in your site, so you can ’see’ the site without actually clicking through it.


What *is* the point? Really?

  • I don’t care what the webpage under the link looks like,
  • I don’t need a popup with a search box (?) when I hover over a link,
  • When I hover and click to go to a link you recommend then it
    flashes something up which obscures what I am doing and makes me think
    I clicked the wrong thing,
  • It’s unclear why I should believe what "SNAPS" is telling me
    rather than the activity bar of my browser,
  • The popup is ugly and does not fit in with my theme,
  • and did I mention that I don’t care what a thumbnail sketch of
    the target webpage as seen from 15 feet away, looks like?

Sounds like one of those cool Web 2.0 ideas it’s got AJAX in it, so it’s got to be good for you. But after the initial few times, it becomes just another annoying little box that pops up every time you run over a link. Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures sums up it well:

My feeling is that installing things that start to control and take
over the readers experience can be annoying, and unless the reader has
the ability to control these and turn them off, they are not worth
violating the “browsing experience” with the reader.

Thank God that in the spirit of empowerment there is an option to disable the Snap preview on the site you are reading or on all sites. So this is interruption a la Web 2.0.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Pop-ups 2.0?”

  1. Christopher Schultz on February 13th, 2007 21:43 pm

    Hi Adriana -

    Great post, we’re both clearly in agreement on the fact that we don’t like those Snap Popups. At least pressure like this is getting them to tailor them to allow more user control. I still won’t install them on our site. Keep up the great writing.

    chris

  2. alan p on February 14th, 2007 10:39 am

    I thought it was just me! Kindred spirits!

    How about helping form S.P.A.M - Snap Popups Are MegaIrritating (I blogged about it here on broadstuff a while back :)

  3. alan p on February 14th, 2007 10:41 am

    And one more thing…that turn off feature seems to turn itself on again after a while….

    Oh, and another thing - what about that talking Apple Ad?

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