Later today Web previews product Snap is launching 8 new localized versions of their Snap Preview Anywhere product. They will support 9 languages in all:
- English (by Default)
- Japanese
- Korean
- Chinese – Simplified
- Chinese – Traditional
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Portuguese
Web Previews – good or bad?
But whatever the language, it’s up to end users the world over to decide if web previews are useful or an annoyance. Back in January Alex Iskold looked at several Web previews products, including Snap, Browster, Cooliris. Also in February I reviewediReader, a browser extension that lets you preview the content of a link before you click on it. The general verdict for all these products was that they are potentially useful, but more often than not the implementation was an annoyance for the reader.
Since that time, Snap has released a number of upgrades to their Web previews product – specifically aimed at addressing those usability issues. Snap Preview Anywhere added a bubble icon, css themes, better and more granular control of the hover trigger, and a larger image size option. Also there is now an option to have just the icon as the preview trigger, which seems like an elegant way to let readers know that it’s something in addition to a normal hyperlink – which they will soon realize is a web preview. This gets around the potential issue of people hovering their mouse cursor over links and getting unexpected preview pop-ups.
As you may have noticed, I’ve implemented Snap Preview Anywhere onto the site. I’ve already found it useful to ‘preview’ the webpage links of the commenters on Read/WriteWeb. But let me know your feedback on it – particularly the usability aspects.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)