Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

Mazal Tov to one of the world’s fastest growing ad networks!

I posted more information, including highlights from the past 12 months, on the Snap Blog.

 Happy Birthday

Tiger Woods

Technorati Tags: Snap Shots, Anniversary

While doing a search on eBay I noticed an invitation to try their new search at the Playground. I took the plunge and immediately liked the new experience and that fact it became cleaner, more visual and with better search refinement controls – just like how a product search should be (see Like.com, thefind.com, PriceGrabber.com and others).

Here are a few additional observations on the new interface:

• The active search criteria is clearly displayed above the result set. The user does not have to guess which options are on. In the old version it was more difficult and less clear – the user had to look at the drop downs located at the long left column (often this required scrolling). In the new interface, it is also very easy to remove a criteria using the red [x]. One things that would be a nice addition is the ability to add multiple options from the same category where it is applicable (for example – Brand or Technology)

• As can be seen in the image above, a new mode for viewing results was added called “Snapshot”. It displays a tile of product images and when mousing over an image additional information is being displayed — just like Snap’s Snap Shots. This makes me wonder – is “Snap Shot” becoming a generic term (and verb) similar to what happened to Xerox and Google…?

• The “Refine your Search” left column was redesigned and is now cleaner, shorter and displays most of the options above the fold line. This was achieved by moving some of the less frequently used options into a popup window (although some design work is still required to make sure all options are visible and there is not need to scroll), the usage of cleaner controls like the price slider (very popular on travel search sites like Kayak and Farechase) and simple controls instead of check boxes and drop downs.

Bottom line – Kudos to the eBay team for creating an improved search experience. My only suggestion to you – add a “Filter by Color” option where applicable (Clothing, Shoes, Accessories and more).

Update: Renee VonBergen, a sr. manager for buyer experience at eBay, corrected me – a color slider is available in certain categories. The direction is really good but could be improved:

• It would be helpful to see it on more products – some people pick their cell phone or guitar by the color
• If you pick a color that returns no results, you get to something that is similar to a dead-end. In this case it would be helpful (for both eBay and the user) to get recommendations to similar products (“We could not find green shoes but we have blue ones”)

BlogWorld kicked off last night and the exhibit started this morning. The atmosphere here is quite different than ad:tech, New York–much more calm and relaxed.

At BlogWorld Snap is presenting Snap Shares – our program that helps publishers earn more money using Snap Shots by sharing with some of the ad impressions that are now part of the Shots. It creates an incremental revenue stream while delivering highly relevant content at the top area of the Shot. It works great with Google AdSense and with other affiliate programs.

We have been getting many visitors to our booth, handed out cool swags, and provided answers and information as well as received great feedback from the users.

Tonight and tomorrow the rest of the company will join us at Vegas to conquer the halls with the cool Snap T-Shirts.

SearchMash, the playground for Google engineers keen to invent new technologies and interfaces, has just released a Flash-based version that uses Snap.com’s website previews.

The more I use it, it feels like Snap.com. Ain’t previews great when you browse and search the web!

Read more here: http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/25/breaking-major-news/

Or try the new SearchMash

A quick update to those of you who follow my work at Snap. Yesterday we released two significant improvements to our product:

• MapShot – triggered of links to maps.google.com and displays a GoogleMap for a an address, a point of interest of a location specified using lat/long. The Shot also offers a neat way to perform quick local searches. More information can be found on the Snap blog . Here are a few examples:
  • Address (130 W. Union St., Pasadena, CA)
  • Lat/Long
  • Point of Interest: Disneyland

• WikiShot – A wise man once said “a picture is worth a thousand words”. We have improved our Wikipedia crawler to search for images inside articles and display them inside the WikiShot when such are available. Detailed information can be found here. Here are a few examples:
  • Empire State Building
  • Snare Drum
  • Radiohead

Another exciting day at Snap! We are announcing today a new partnership with Six Apart to offer Snap Shots to all Vox.com bloggers. Any Vox blogger can now easily enable Snap Shots on his blog with a few clicks via the blog admin console.

More information about the partnership and detailed instructions how to activate Snap Shots can be found on the Snap blog or on the Vox Team blog.

Here’s an example of a VideoShot on a random Vox blog.

Technorati Tags: Vox, Snap Shots, Snap.com, Six Apart

Snap Shots Add-On is now available for Internet Explorer. What’s so great about it? It enhances the experience on the web sites you visit regularly and can save you a lot of wasted time by previewing the content behind the link.

What I really like about it is the fact it truly upgraded my Netvibes experience. I use Netvibes as my favorite RSS reader and with the Snap Shots Add-On I can preview any external link inside posts. In addition to Netvibes, the Snap Shots Add-On supports a wide range of sites including:

• Search engines ? Google (in any language), Yahoo (in any language), MSN Live, AOL Search, Ask, Lycos and Baidu
• Blogging platforms ? Blogger, Typepad and Vox
• Web based RSS Readers ? Netvibes, Google Reader and Bloglines
• Social Networks & Video Sharing ? Myspace, YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video, Xanga, Veoh and Revver
• Popular news and blogs sites ? Google News, Huffington Post, Drudge Report and more are on the way
• Reference sites – Wikipedia, IMDB
• e-commerce – Amazon.com
• All other web sites will get the Snap Shot functionality as long as they have links to sites associated with a “Rich Snap Shot”: Video, Wiki, Product, Photo, Stock, Audio (but not RSS or Preview)

Try it out – Download the Snap Shots Add-On for Internet Explorer or FireFox

Since the launch of Snap Shots back in Nov 2006 (at the time the product was called “Snap Preview Anywhere”), we have been receiving plenty of requests from users asking for a browser add-on that allows them to take the Snap Shots functionality to the entire web.

Today, we are happy to announce the release of Snap Shots Add-On for Web Browsers (Firefox version available today, IE version is coming soon).

Here are just a few examples of Snap Shots Add-On can make improve users browsing experience:

• Search engines – Get Snap Shots and previews on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Live and others. I am sure you will appreciate the fact that by being able to see what’s behind the link your “Back” button usage and the time you wait for different pages to load just to find out they are not relevant will significantly reduce.
• Myspace – Snap Shots Add-On displays profile information of people who leave comments on myspace page…
• Wikipedia – any link to a wikipedia page turns from ‘just a link’ into an instant encyclopedia
• RSS – Visit blogs on different platforms (blogger, typepad, vox etc) and rollover their blogroll just to read the RSS excerpts of the linked blogs
• and there are plenty of other useful examples – just try it when you visit Amazon, Wikipedia, IMDB, YouTube, Metacafe and many other sites.

To get started Download the Snap Shots Add-On.

BTW, Snap.com home page also got a nice facelift and it now features Snap Shots solutions for Bloggers/Publishers and End Users more prominently.

Technorati Tags: Snap.com, Snap Shots, Firefox, Browser Add-On

A short viral video that Snap.com design & marketing folks created.

You might have noticed that some of the links on my blog that previously displayed a PreviewShot (image of the linked web site) now display RSS information from the linked site. This new capability is called RSS Shot and it’s the latest improvement & enhancement that we added to the Snap Shots product.

This is how it works in plain words:

• An Expanded View would show if the link is to a specific article or to a blog post permalink
• An Excerpts View would show if the link is to a site that has an RSS feed accosiated with it. Typically you will see 2-4 headlines depends on the size of the bubble

A more detailed & technical description is avlaiable on the Snap blog.  

The more I use it I find it more and more useful. In many cases it is faster for me to visit hover over the links on my site’s blogroll and see thier latest headlines than to launch an RSS reader (Netvibes has become really slow for me lately, not sure why). What do you think?