Comments for Microsoft Gaze: This Might be Worse than Snap

Microsoft Gaze: This Might be Worse than Snap

2009-02-03T18:26:59Z

Do you remember those annoying Snap.com popups that have thankfully disappeared from most blogs again? Don't be too happy about that yet, because Microsoft is about to release a very similar product name Gaze. Gaze, which is set to launch on April 15th, will provide contextual ads based on keywords in the content of a site. Just like Snap, Gaze will underline keywords on a web page and will pop up a small box with ads and additional information about the keyword whenever you hover over it.

]]> Todd Bishop, who alerted us to this announcement, has done some additional sleuthing and found out that Microsoft hasn't yet registered the trademarks for most of the terms that Mario Esposito, an adCenter Labs program manager, uses in the announcement of this new product. However, given that the beta program runs under the Microsoft Advertising banner, Bishop assumes "that this is more than just a research project."

We tried to install the Gaze code on our own websites, but it didn't pick up on any keywords yet. This is no surprise though, given that the beta only supports two content types right now: celebrities and travel.

We were able to try out the back-end of Gaze, however. The site allows content producers to heavily customize the user experience. You can, for example, choose whether the popup box is activated when users hover over it, or only once they actually click on the link. You can also change the color of the popup box, and manipulate when and where the popups appear.

When Snap's popups first appeared in 2007, they were generally considered to be highly annoying and many users argued that they ruined the reading experience. Since then, Snap has toned things down a bit, but Gaze looks like a throwback to the old Snap experience. Other companies, like Panels.net, are trying to implement similar ideas. There are definitely situations where these popup boxes can be quite helpful - stock quotes, for example - but most readers never really warmed up to the idea of popup info boxes.

Comment from Lorand R. Minyo on 2009-02-03

2009-02-03T20:03:53Z

Funny you should mention that they are annoying (I totally agree though), yet even TechCrunch is using Snap.

Comment from Jay Meydad on 2009-02-03

2009-02-03T21:46:41Z

Frederic,

1. The product you refer to is actually called Snap Shots. Snap.com is that company that operates it.

2. Unlike Microsoft Gaze, Snap Shots does not change the content of a web page and it does not turn non-linked text to a hyperlink. It enhances *existing* hyperlinks by providing additional information based on where a link points to.

3. The articles you refer to in your post are from early 2007. They were posted shortly after Snap Shots was released. We have responded to these posts and additional feedback from users and publishers by changing and enhancing the product so it gives both end users and publishers a greater control over the user experience.

4. With regards to "...many users argued that they ruined the reading experience...". Snap Shots address a user need. If it wasn’t, how come some 2 million site owners have added Snap Shots to their sites? How come hundreds of thousands of end-users have downloaded and installed the Snap Shots browser add-on, so they can bring the functionality with them to sites like Google, Amazon and YouTube?

When you (or I for matter) roll over links — that often are not blue nor underlined, are not particularly well defined within the opening and closing of the anchor tag and do not include the title attribute — you have been trained to glance down at the browser status bar, parse the URL visually in a blink of a second, and hedge your bets by opening the links in a new tab. *This is not the case for most users*.

The fact that more companies, including major ones such as Microsoft, release products that enhance the web browsing experience, is an encouraging sign for us that this is a big market and we are happy to be the leading player in that market.

As I said, we are committed to making Snap Shots *more useful for more people*, so if you have suggestions for how to improve the experience, we are all ears.

-jay

---
Jay Meydad
Vice President, Products & Operations
Snap.com

jay {at} snap {dot} com

Comment from sexysofie on 2009-02-03

2009-02-03T22:09:25Z

adblock filter = .snap.com/$script
noscript = Mark snap.com as Untrusted
127.0.0.1 snap.com
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com

Comment from OnWebDev on 2009-02-03

2009-02-04T01:03:34Z

Interesting... I'll Microsoft release the GazePopupBlocker with IE8, so users can turn Gaze PopUps off? I doubt it :)

Comment from Jack Sparks on 2009-02-03

2009-02-04T01:53:46Z

I never liked these in-page popups, regardless if it's called Gaze, Apture or Snap. They're annoying and distracting. I've been playing quite a bit with Juice lately, which allows you to highlight any keyword on a page and get information through a sidebar. All optional, all hidden by default.

Comment from feloniousmonk on 2009-02-03

2009-02-04T02:44:56Z

i wonder if this is the result of the FAST acquisition. i understand that they had been working on a similar product. even if not, i (unfortunately) was on a team that developed a similar product on fast's technology.

Comment from venkat on 2009-02-03

2009-02-04T06:26:48Z

Who is getting familiar in this article is snaps rahter than Microsoft's Gaze,indeed it's not true that lot of bloggers have not usng sanps,still lot of bloggers usings snap,very irritating popups really for a reader to read articles.

Comment from Kuldeep Kapade on 2009-02-04

2009-02-04T09:23:08Z

I agree with Jay and I am a huge fan of Snap Shots. It really saves my time by giving a peak at those links which otherwise I will have to open it fully to get the actual idea of what it is. And it also works great with sites like IMDb and Wikipedia where short info is given in the pop-up, which saves lot of time. And I also hate those products which turns keywords (not links) into pop-ups, thats completely annoying and hardly proves useful.

I am surprised by this articles, it fails to depict complete picture and compares services falsely.

Comment from Bob Frederickson on 2009-02-07

2009-02-07T16:55:58Z

I agree with Kuldeep.

Any analysis of these type of products should clearly differentiate between those that deliver only ad content (Kontera and IntelliTXT) and those that deliver a content-rich experience with a modest amount of advertising (Snap and others). Unfortunately, the prevalence of the ad products and their terrible "fake links" have tarnished the reputation of similarly functioning but truly useful products like Snap.

Comment from söve on 2009-02-26

2009-02-26T08:46:30Z

Comment from boya on 2009-02-26

2009-02-26T08:50:16Z

Funny you should mention that they are annoying (I totally agree though), yet even TechCrunch is using Snap