What is it? Well, WebSnapr 2.0 is a service which lets you capture screenshots of (almost) any web page. It allows your visitors to instantly visualize any web page before clicking. And it claims 
to “increase site traffic, click-through rate and site stickiness,” though I’m not sure how.
I first saw it used on DotNetKicks and I thought it was cool so I investigated. WebSnapr 2.0 is free and it so easy to implement! And talk about accommodating. There are already a ton of plugins available which are featured on the site. Of course, I zoomed in on the WebSnapr WordPress Plugin which enables a “WebSnapr Preview Bubble” for every link on one’s site with zero code changes! (You can add the preview for individual links as well, but that requires some effort — the manual additional of a style tag.)
Unfortunately, based on response times I’m seeing early this morning, I think the free and easy implementation is going to be the product’s downfall. As far as I can tell, every captured screenshot will require a call to http://images.websnapr.com/?url=[url]&size=[size]. Though I am sure there must be some caching going on, my bet is the traffic is going to add up extremely fast now that WebSnapr topped the digg and del.icio.us charts last week. (Maybe Google will buy the service and help out in this area?)
I activated the plugin on one my other sites and I received less-than-stellar results.
In the first case, the preview was rendered very quickly. On the WebSnapr site, it stated that “it might take a few seconds before the thumbnail is captured. If so, you’ll see a Snapshot currently in queue message. This will be gone as soon as your thumbnail is generated.”
Since this message didn’t appear for the popular WordPress URL, I assumed the snapshot was probably cached which benefited the performance.
On the same page, a less popular URL screen shot was queued (see right.) This seemed logical, however, I also noticed a number of broken images on the same page (see below.)
I wasn’t able to successfully grab a screen shot of the broken image (and they were there for well over a minute) so I browsed around to other sites to see if I could find an example of the “issue.”
I was able to quickly find the same problem on the site where I downloaded the plugin. I have to admit that I found it very strange that the WebSnapr URL, itself, wasn’t rendering a preview. It makes me think my caching assumption is bogus.
The WebSnapr service is a great idea and it is really very cool. It is a nice addition to anyone’s site – especially when it’s performing well. I look forward to reading more about the technology behind the product. I guess it’s time I start translating the creator’s blog.
[...] 10. XSD Snapr - Snapr simply integrates WebSnapr-Script in your WordPress blog. Adds preview bubble to all external links. For more, check out my previous post. [...]
perhaps you should check this other wp plugin for websnapr http://andufo.com/proyectos/wp-websnapr/
[...] 10. XSD Snapr – Snapr simply integrates WebSnapr-Script in your WordPress blog. Adds preview bubble to all external links. For more, check out my previous post. [...]
i am using the preview service from http://www.girafa.com – which is free and great
For your thumbnails/thumbshot one address: http://www.mythumbshot.com.
It’s a free service with hight image quality
snapcasa serves about 21K snapshots daily to two of my domains. They are as reliable as websnapr but do not have the watermark or the horrible ad like websnapr. Other services were constantly down. I have used snapcasa for two months now and am very happy.
Try http://www.sitethumbshot.com/. Working fine for me.
Wonderfull description. It doesn’t work this plugin. I attempt again.
Greetings
I would like to know if know if there has been any changes since Google started showing web previews with the search page.
A nice novelty. Quite honestly, I find these site previewers to be quite useless and highly annoying at best. I guess you can see if a site is “attractive” or not before visiting but gives no real insight into much of anything.
I have not checked in here for some time because I thought it was getting boring, but the last few posts are great quality so I guess I?¦ll add you back to my daily bloglist. You deserve it my friend
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