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My name is Ramkumar Shankar and I love Sweden, my iPhone (but possibly considering the switch to Android), guitar, linux, open source, football, metal, and general geekery among other things...and in no particular order (except for Sweden at the top of the list). I also use some of that knowledge to pay my bills as a technology consultant. This is my tumblelog, where I post original content as well as some of the good stuff I find around the net. |
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"More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development."
Peter-Paul Koch, on the iPhone obsession. Great read, and you will appreciate the colour of the language.
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Snap Shots are annoying when they’re everywhere
Yes, it’s about those little link previews you can have on your site. Here’s where you get them from. But wait…don’t. Or at least be careful how you use them.
- The site previews are too small to be useful. They list down some examples for audio, video and pictures. It might work for audio, but something tells me I’d prefer a bigger embedded versions of flickr photos or youtube videos.
- Also, I’m not sure if embedding videos or content inside a ‘snap shot’ will get them noticed or viewed.
- If I see interesting links, I usually open new tabs and check them later. But Snap Shots brings up an annoying pseudo pop-up, which blocks out the content and breaks continuity when reading.
- They can get redundant sometimes and that’s when they get even more annoying, like on this page. There is no need to have a ‘snap shot’ for the Get Started link. If people want to sign up, they’ll click it anyway. Otherwise they won’t. What’s the point of having a little pop up, which is also too small to be of any use in the first place?
To be fair, there are some examples where snap shots are useful. They include showing stock prices, celebrity info or highlighting a product’s amazon page. In those cases, it works very well. Quick little snippets of information which are still very readable in the little preview box. More like good-to-know metadata. For things I won’t need to click in the first place. Techcrunch has a nice way of handling this. You only get a preview if you hover your mouse over the little snap shot icon next to the text links.
Just don’t snapshot-ize every link on your site.
