Snap

I have added Snap Preview Anywhere to my blog. What a great idea! Whenever you hover over a link you get a thumbnail of the URL it leads to.

Amazon must be upset too because these are thumbnails of the exact page, not just a domain home page and they are captured very soon after being queued -- much better than Alexa.

I have some quibbles from a business point of view though: They appear to be marketing themselves as a search engine; that isn't going too happen there is way too much competition and their results aren't even taken from one of the top three (Snap adds a great new level to this cryptic linking technique doesn't it?) The behaviour is added by webmasters themselves by adding a JavaScript to their page, I think the decision to see these previews should be a user decision and not a content provider decision; this means the realm of browser add-ons.

On the Google YouTube purchase

An article in today's Economist provides a good brief summary of Google's aquisition of YouTube. It also gives a good (but journalistic) summary of where all the big online players now stand in relation to each other.

However the article does carelessly describe Microsoft as the software giant that dominated "the first generation of the web" in a way that implies they are behind now. I hate to use the phrase "Web 2.0" but you don't have to walk far from "Web 2.0" before you see a JavaScript XMLHttpRequest object, and we all know who invented that!

Facebook lawyers

I recently received a cease and desist letter from the law firm representing Facebook. They had a problem with my registration of the domain name facebookquizzes.com (I had considered setting up another skinned version of QuizSender.com targeting Facebook users). I did manage to get some free advertising in an Oxford Student article though.