I've long been on the fence about whether seeing a thumbnail picture of a web site actually gives me any useful information about the site, but I know a cool web service when I see it and
WebSnapr is pretty cool. It's a service aimed at developers and more technical users that generates thumbnails quickly and easily given a URL like images.websnapr.com/?url=www.example.com. This makes it easy for developers to add web site thumbnails to their own sites and software. WebSnapr has an
example JavaScript that demonstrates how to make external links display a thumbnail of the destination site when hovered over with the mouse. As you might expect, capturing those thumbnails takes processor cycles, and as a result thumbnails aren't immediately available--while a thumbnail is processed (which, like most such services, can take awhile depending on server load), WebSnapr generates a "Thumbnail in queue" image instead.
Tags: screenshot, thumbnail, web 2.0, Web2.0, web20, websnapr
Facebook Plunges Again
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsJaredOct 18th 2006 4:56PM
It seems pretty cool to me, and I really like that it doesn't rely on Alexa's thumbnails for the images. I bet it won't be long before there is a firefox extension or a greasemonkey extension to use this service on every link.
The only thing I've noticed is that when the site uses some AJAX to load a part of the page, the screenshot is taken before the asynchronous calls return. That could be a pretty difficult fix on their side, though. Maybe it's a faulty implementation of AJAX that is the problem.
andufoOct 18th 2006 5:15PM
Check out my recently created websnapr wordpress plugin.