File this one under annoyances that need to go away now!

There’s a service out there called Snap that I despise with a passion. Snap enabled websites have links that display a preview image with a search box when you mouse over an item. These preview images are utterly useless and can actually be damaging to a site if the owner of the site is not careful.

Check the links in the trackbacks on this post over at TechCrunch. Before you do I must warn you that some of the resulting preview images are pornographic and downright disgusting. Unfortunately they make a very powerful point on the dangers of A) Utilizing a useless tool to try and make a few bucks and B) failing to properly protect your site from spam.

The bottom line is that Snap previews equal an unwanted non-value added distraction to your site visitors. Definitely not worth the measly pennies to be earned from the resulting click throughs. And Snap plus comment or trackback spam equals potential disaster as your site visitors might have to wade through pornography to find out what’s happening in the conversation.

I’ve known about Snap for a while and have begun avoiding sites that use this annoying piece of internet junk. So today I was utterly disappointed to discover that WordPress.com has added snap as a feature by default to all existing blogs hosted by their service. Why not just add the feature, broadcast the message that it’s available then let bloggers decide for themselves? Methinks there is a venture capital related revenue strategy being implemented here.

To be fair there were a lot of positive responses (and a few negative ones) to Matt’s feature announcement. Then again, I don’t think 400 positive responses out of 500,000 blogs represents a quorum. Bad move Matt. You should never introduce a feature that changes the UI of someone’s blog in this manner. You should have introduced the feature as indicated above.

I’ll be registering my vote accordingly. My wife has a blog over there and I’m going to start the process of designing her a site on her own domain, probably using Drupal. I know she can turn the feature off, but I think this is going to be the first in a string of non-democratic moves made by the folks at WordPress.com. I hope I’m wrong about that.

For the record. I noticed the problem with the trackback spam on TechCrunch a week ago. I immediately sent an email to editor[at]techcrunch[dot]com informing them of the problem. I have gotten no response from them on the email and the trackback spam still lives. So I can only assume that they’re asleep at the switch. That’s too bad. And it just goes to show that the basics of social media can be ignored by the so called “A-Listers”.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Wordpress.com, Snap, Annoyance, TechCrunch, Spam, Trackback, Lesson[/tags]