After writing the previous entry, I was hovering my mouse over my meager blogroll when a Snap preview window popped up. “WTF!?” I thought. Well this blog’s a week old, it could be I just haven’t noticed this “feature” before. Apparently they just released the infection last night, i.e. WordPress.com decided to enable it on all their blogs.
I hate it. First it pops up, and then it realizes it needs to flip its silly little arrow, and then you get a “please wait while loading preview”. Only after you wait one or two seconds that you get the preview. Which doesn’t bring much either, you can only see the site’s design, and nothing else! And all that changing of content is like a f’ing TV ad, which just gives me a headache!
Luckily I have Proxomitron, where I can just treat the whole snap.com domain as an ad-provider, and filter it out Internet-wide! I only noticed the previews on this blog because it bypasses Proxomitron filters at the moment (to make sure all the Javascript/cookies work).
Anyway, the idea sucks and the implementation so far sucks (I’m sure I’d be able to engineer something that pops up (or maybe use fade to not hurt the eyes) after its contents are ready, not making the user wait for it). The company is just boasting that 600k WordPress blogs now have it. Well that’s because they just enabled it on on everybody. I wonder how many blogowners will disable it. Or, the more important metric is, how many readers will disable it. I’m pretty sure power-surfers have no use for tiny little windows popping up interrupting their reading and link-clicking. I wonder if they will publish such statistics as how many viewers disable their little feature/annoyance after encountering it. Or if they’ll let webmasters see if the reader of their particular site like this feature/annoyance or not.
I guess this really is Bubble 2.0. And I know one particular company I wouldn’t be putting my money on.
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