Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Link Thumbnail: Photo Mouse Over
Category: JavaScript
, Library, UI
When Ben and I were at an “Under the Radar” O’Reilly event, one of the companies was trying to push a product that allowed you to mouseover a link and see what comes next.
People doubted whether a company could be made around that idea, and now we are seeing more and more ways where developers can add that functionality.
The latest is Link Thumbnail which is:
A little bit JavaScript, a little bit CSS and a little bit clairvoyance, Link Thumbnail shows users that are about to leave your site exactly where they’re going. When that curious mouse pointer hovers over a link pointing to somewhere outside of your site, the script displays a small image of the destination page. It’s a nice visual cue that serves a very real purpose: providing a clearer picture (no pun intended) of what’s ahead.
Hi!, it’s cool.
Few days ago I create a Wordpress Plugin with this code.
http://www.anieto2k.com/2006/07/18/linkthumb-plugin-crea-miniaturas-de-la-direccion-de-tus-enlaces/
Great.
Careful, this script first (ab)used alexa.com, now msnsearch.srv.girafa.com to get it images. It seems unlikely that anyone except girafas customers are allowed to display the images. More likely this script was created with (simple reverse engineering) to dispslay copyrighted material, and should be treated as such.
From my POV, this script impressive as it is, should be used only with caution.
Voiding copyrights is not cool, just stupid. IMHO.
This can be done without the use of javascript.
Check out my blog post - I remade this script so it fits better with the prototype / scriptaculous and behaviour framework
http://www.wordescapes.co.uk/blog/?p=4
In any form, it’s quite lame. Are we really lacking bandwidth such that there is an advantage to see what’s there without going to it? Additional, the thumbnail is so small, it barely gives you an indication of what the site is about, much less providing any of the actually useful site content is. You still need to go to the site to do anything.
Come to think of it, since the thumbnail isn’t readable in many cases, this might only serve to encourage people to make big-font and large-graphic splash pages so that the thumbnail actually holds some useful information (consider the screenshot of the mozilla site in the example). Is that really where we want to go, back to useless, skippable, no-value-add splash pages?
I guess the idea behind this all is that users might recognize the webpage on the image, and can see if they have already visited it. But IMO just the plain URL is better recognizable since a lot of webpages look exactly the same.
BTW The example doesn’t work in Safari (2.0.4) (yet?)
i am sure all parked domains and link farms will use this script.
:D just joking, i think it is great, especailly for users who need to know if a link entered by another user is spam or not.
Its interesting. i need the code for this.