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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