We all remember when popup advertisements were all the rage, advertisers were reaping the benefits of having their advertisement flush in the consumers eyes whenever they visited web sites. Just boom and your product is in their face and they have to look at it. Brilliant. We of course learned our mistakes, well most of us learned our mistakes, and went to more subtle advertisements based on the users interests that gave the consumer the ability to choose to click on an advertisement if they were interested. Now, we have snap preview that takes that choice and adds a little suggestive manipulation to make sure the user sees the advertisement.Snap preview is a simple javascript applet that you can add to your web site that will give you a preview of the link that you are about to click. Although it is not an advertisement it is a marketing tool for Snap and generates a ton of revenue for them as they gather marketing data about all the web sites they are being used on. Snap previews are like spyware for a web site.

Not only are they intrusive but ridiculously annoying, just like popups used to be. They serve no real purpose because seeing what the link looks like before you click isn’t going to help anyone any better. You can’t read the text that is on the web site to know if it is the right thing you can only see the basic layout of the web site. It is a useless annoying widget that is causing clutter on web sites.

It is nice to have some of these widgets on your web site but the point where they become intrusive and obtrusive by hindering your view in the current web site you are visiting. Not only are Snap previews obtrusive but they add a lot of load time to the web sites they are added on. In my opinion Snap previews should be banned and are a useless addition to any web site.

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