Snapshots in your Face

May 9, 2008

snapshots

Snapshots is a pop up ad service.

No, wait, that doesn’t do it justice. It’s the most annoying pop up ad service in existence. It presents itself as a relevant semantic web application when, in reality, it’s just annoying.

You can see what they do by rolling over any of the links at Techcrunch and you can see their website at http://www.snap.com.

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under Fun 

Comments

Viewing 3 Comments

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    Hey, Justin,

    Sorry you don't like Snap Shots. We're all entitled our opinions. This being the first time we've been featured in a cartoon, I couldn't resist--the image below is your cartoon in a Shot.
    http://blog.snap.com/wp-content/uploads/Firefox...

    Best,

    Paul
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    Hey Paul,

    Maybe I was a little hard on Snapshots, so I'll explain why it's annoying to me and offer a solution.

    The problem with the service is the fact that it pops up with no provocation. I often find myself reading a blog post and suddenly, because my mouse has been wandering a bit, there's a pop up balloon directly over the text I've been reading. Snapshots puts itself in the same camp as pop up ads.

    The solution, in my opinion, is to make the little balloon graphic next to the links clickable. That is to say, rather than making the action onmouseover, it should be an event that's triggered with a left mouse click.

    That would make it less annoying, and put Snapshots in a position to be a much more useful, and less invasive service.

    Thanks for commenting Paul, and thanks for reading.
    Justin
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    Justin--

    Your point is well-taken--reducing unintended triggers is and has been a major initiative here at Snap since we launched Snap Shots--but ultimately defeats the purpose. The point of Snap Shots is to quickly bring you the best content from another site without clicking, so that you can rapidly scan through a blog roll to see which have updated, for example.

    To reduce unintended triggers and thus increase end user satisfaction (which we measure by counting the number of people who use our easy opt-out) we've done things like add the link icon, allow sites to make only the link icon the trigger, changed the latency (the time between the mouse over and the trigger), and eliminated triggers caused by scroll wheels.

    Because we are so focused on the end user experience, we've actually seen a significant decrease in opt-outs (even as we've made it easier) and an increase in downloads of our Add-On. Despite the fact that we hardly market Add-On, we've downloaded about 400K copies, way more than 10x the number of opt-outs. BTW, I always welcome comparisons to pop-up ads as they a) make opt-out near impossible and b) don't offer an Add-On!

    Best regards and have a great weekend,

    Paul Angles
    Marketing Director
    Snap.com

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