I’ve been asked by website owners about displaying previews / screencaps on browse.ie in the past, but I couldn’t find an alternative to thumbshots et al which are a bit limited in their range of site previews. A lot of smaller sites aren’t available, so it isn’t overly helpful to use their service.
The other day, however, I came across a free service that seems to rectify the situation – Snap Preview Anywhere.
The service works by giving you a thumbnail when you hover over a link to an external site (click to view larger image):
I’ve put it on a couple of directory sites I run, so I’ll see if there’s any feedback from users.
I can’t see this service being of much use to blogs targetting the more technical users, but I can see it being very useful for those targetting the less technically minded who might find the extra bit of “eye candy” to be useful.
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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Two more for the list?…
http://thumboo.com/
http://websnapr.com/
One more for the list, http://www.girafa.com , which is the best in my opinion.
Richard – pity the thumboo code isn’t *nix based 🙁
Steven – interesting.. though the limits would worry me a small bit
The Girafa thumbnail service is free for showing 2000 images a day, which is a lot, actually it depands on your site… if you have more thumbnails to show, use their paid service which is about 25$ a month, a good ROI.
Steven
You mean “our paid service” not “their paid service”, don’t you?
If you want to promote your company’s goods and services then please be honest about it. Pretending that you are an objective third party reflects badly on both you and the company you work for
Regards
Michlee