I just noticed that the site had snapshots for certain links (those are in-window popups which provide you with additional options for a certain thing. You can see an example if you hover over the Digg this, Google this, etc. bar you get at the top of the page when viewing posts) and I was wondering what people thought about them.

Personally, it seems to me that they introduce too much clutter. I see where they're coming from, but if I wanted to follow a link, I would just click it. I don't need it to barge into my current page.

Then again, this is just an initial impression.

P.S. Regardless of what I will end up thinking about this, thank you Michael for trying to improve the site with new features.

I'm surprised you just noticed it. It's been there for a while. The links you mention are by accident and I should remove it from there (i can do that i think...). It's intended for general links in posts as shown below:



It only pops up when you hover over the little balloon icon. Hovering over the link does not show it. If you hover over an RSS or a wikipedia link or something like that it actually gives you the text not just the image:



Also, because I believe in choice (and i was expecting complaints), you can totally turn it off. Go to the portal and scroll to the bottom left. You will see an option to turn it off. OR, click on the top right of the snap window and select disable.

I like it, especially when there's no indication in the linked text what the link actually is. It's more informative than hovering over the link and looking at the URL down in the lower corner of the browser.

BTW, you can install the Snap Shots plugin for Firefox -- it works for any website.

Well, I did notice those small balloon icons about two or three weeks ago, when they were added, but I thought they were just meant to make the link stand out. I never hovered over them.

I actually noticed this now because I hovered over Tomi's signature and that triggered it. I then (I'm not sure why) hovered over one of the icons at the top and that triggered it too, which was why I figured it was a new feature, since I thought I probably would have seen it before.

Providing previews to text links does actually seem to be useful. I will leave this on for the moment and see whether I like it or not.

These things have been around on other sites for a while now. Thanks to Michael for constantly trying to improve this site, but personally, I hate these things with an undying passion. They're especially annoying in link-heavy text, where I'm scrolling down with the mouse wheel, the scrolling brings the cursor over a link and, *pop*, whatever I was reading is now obscured by a preview of a web page I don't really care about.

Did this snapshot preview thing go away sometime in the past couple weeks, or is it just me?
Gary

Yep - Michael removed it late last week in an effort to speed up page loading. Personally, I think it worked...