Are Snap Previews just Popups 2.0?

I’ve been seeing a lot of the new Snap Preview Anywhere windows on blogs that we visit frequently. Mike Arrington installed and reviewed them over on TechCrunch and so did Ryan Carson over at Vitamin and they both endorse the product at Snap.

Initially, I thought it was a neat idea to be able to embed screenshot previews of links in our own site, so as a user browsed, they could preview where the link when without clicking on the link and leaving our site. If anything, it might add to retention, giving users a “taste” of where the link is headed, but encouraging them to continue reading on our own blog.

We received a comment after Blake’s post about Snap from Anita who said:

I always thought the Snap technology was cool, but get REALLY annoyed by the little snap popup over every link, particularly if I’m just browsing.

If you read the comment stream at TechCrunch, you’ll see the same comments from readers on posts, like Ty who said:

This is off-topic, but I found no other way to contact Techcrunch about this: Is there a way to turn off the “snap preview” pop-up? I thought it was cool at first but now it’s just annoying seeing that little box pop-up every time I run over a link.

Frankly, the commenters’ opinions are what I am most interested in, because they represent the people the intrusion effects, but Lorelle on Wordpress has a negative opinion as does Ben the Instigator.

I think this an example of the fine line you have to walk with installing “gadgets” on your site. Does the Snap Preview popup add value for the reader or for the publisher? It is the reader’s experience that it affects, yet they have no control over it.

Newsweek has declared 2007 the Year of the Widget. There will be more and more opportunities to add plugins to blogs and sites this year, as more Ajax-based and javascript-powered plugins and widgets arrive. 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. Will 2007 actually become the year of Popups 2.0?

In the end, to me they feel a lot like the advertising popups that were symbolized by the X10 cam in Web 1.0. Google and Yahoo even built popup blockers into their browser toolbars. Is someone going to invent a Snap Preview blocker? Probably.

I think it is worth weighing the value add and browsing experience cost to your users before you install gadget features like this. What do our readers think? Should we install them?