Yesterday, Snap.com announced the version of their popular Snap Preview Anywhere feature had been upgraded and renamed to Snap Shots. Containing some elements from ideas garnered from their recent contest (including mine, it seems), the new system allows for several custom “shots” to be used instead of just thumbnails.
For example, I can link directly to a stock feed and Snap Shots will display just the relevant information. Currently, there are shots for Wikipedia, IMDB, several stock sites, YouTube, Amazon, Flickr, MP3 files, and a custom shot for Reuters. They claim to be working on many, many more. Check out all the info at the Snap Shots page.
Before I forget– Grab the easy-peasy WordPress plug-in to start using Snap Shots on your site right this instant!
I do believe this is the beginning of something great for Snap and can only make them more popular. I do hope, however, that they take my advice (from my contest idea) and somehow open up the “shot” creation process. I know, I know… baby steps. They can’t do it all at once, and I think they are building a great foundation. But, I think they can bust this thing wide open if they give content providers and webmasters the tools to customize the hell out of this thing.
I can think of dozens of examples… but here is just one. The ProductShot (that pulls out information from an Amazon product page) is great, but what if I, as a webmaster, wanted to pull out different information (other than the product description and price). Perhaps I want to show the number of reviews (or just show the reviews and not the product description)? After all, customer reviews are one of the top 3 reasons I use Amazon.
I suppose at some point Snap could face screen/data scrapping issues with some websites. Google, for example, specifically forbids automatic scrapping of their data. Yet, Snap is pulling stock quotes from their site. Perhaps they are using the accepted and official API (I have no idea) to do so. After all, with each preview, Snap’s servers are hitting the site and pulling this data. With enough previews being generated, that would mean a ton of traffic from Snap’s servers–how would they respond?
No matter what happens, keep your eye on Snap.com. They seem to be working very hard to provide a very useful and unique service. Snap Shots can only bring them more attention (good or bad).
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I started renting a PO box at the local post office a couple months ago. This was mostly because, more and more, I’m needing to use an address for my side business Coffey Design. Since I work out of the home, I didn’t really like the idea of putting my home address on registry information, newsletters and other marketing materials that could be seen by many.
PO Boxes are actually quite cheap. If I remember, it’s less than $30-40 per 6 months. I got the smallest one they offer. However, the great part is that if I ever receive a package that is too big to fit, they’ll place it in a larger box and put the key in my PO Box. Pretty nice deal.
I hadn’t had much activity on the box (nor did I expect any) until a few weeks ago. I had not checked it in a while and when I opened ‘er up, I found a pile of mail. Well… not mail, but spam!
Several credit card offers, a slick postcard on full color printing, the obligatory scam from “Listing Corp,” and a nice catalog from ULINE Shipping Supply (for all my shipping needs). Those Listing Corp folks send me or my clients something every time I register a domain name. I hate them because their letters are designed to look like a real bill for domain name renewal when all they are doing is trying to get you to renew with them instead of your original registrar. I’m sure plenty of unexperienced domain owners fall for this all the time.
Having a nice pile of wasted paper made me appreciate email a bit more. As annoying as email spam is, it at least can be filtered reasonably well with software. I didn’t ask a single one of these companies for anything. It is clear that they are either buying or skimming registry information.
Perhaps I should give some of these anti-spam ideas a try.
I needed to drop a simple contact form on a client’s WordPress site and tried to find the “Contact Form” plug-in I’ve used a few times before. As I was searching, I came upon a modified version put together by Douglas Karr.
→ Wordpress Contact Form with Spam Protection
This version adds a simple challenge question (the default is 2+2=?) that helps prevent spam. Of course, it isn’t a bulletproof anti-spam measure (but, then again, what is?). However, it’s a step up from nothing and a nice improvement on the original, great plug-in.
I felt compelled to post something about it because it is a small example of how great open source is and how it benefits everyone. Also, I found a new (to me) blog by a fellow Hoosier (even lives in my town). Small world. He just found a new reader.
Actually, it was called an “extreme makeover” contest, but it was basically a fun way to cull some great ideas from the user community about how to improve Snap.com’s Preview Anywhere feature for website owners. SPA is a great service that I enjoy using, so I gave it a shot and won.
The contest ran for about a month and offered cash prizes. There were over 500 ideas submitted. It was a bit daunting to traverse the hundreds of ideas submitted, but the ones I was able to read through ranged from silly to inspiring (I’d like to think I added ideas in both those categories–I had a few silly 11th hour concepts titled “Red SNAPper” and “SNAPping Turtle” …I don’t even remember what they were now).
Check out the contest winners announcement on their blog for details on some great ideas and comments. My idea was basically to create a kind of open-source filter/plug-in system for SPA that allowed anyone to create custom “preview filters” to use on their site. For example, I could create a YouTube filter that caused all SPA preview windows to display the actual video I’m linking to, instead of a thumbnail. The possibilities are endless. And, it provides a huge feature boost without having to burden the SNAP team with creating them all. Think of how the Wordpress plug-in system works–whole communities can form around stuff like this.
Like I said, the other ideas we’re very good, too. Snap’s blog mentions a big feature announcement that may or may not be related to contest ideas. I’m too modest to believe mine would be a part of that (or that they could have implemented a system like that in a month–but who knows!). Let’s just say I’d wear my new SNAP t-shirt a little more often if they did. 
I may write a future post about the marketing thought process that goes into a contest like this. I think this contest was probably the best $5,000 they’ll spend all year.
Different techniques— pros and cons— explained
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