Apture Packs a Lot of Media Into a Little Pop-up
The most obvious feature of Apture is that it is a pop-up technology. Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links - via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them. However, because of its association with pop-ups, Apture thinks it's gotten a bad rap. Many people dislike other pop-up products such as CoolPreviews, Snap and a new Microsoft product we covered recently called Gaze. Why? Because pop-ups can disrupt a user's browsing experience and are sometimes even regarded as a nuisance. We spoke to Apture co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris, to find out what makes Apture different.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've been skeptical of how pop-up technology has been used over the years. But we're also optimistic about the potential for pop-ups to present rich contextual information to readers, as long as it's done in an unobtrusive way.
Apture is a similar service to Panels.net, which pops up useful contextual data about companies and people. Probably what differentiates Apture is that it makes great use of rich media, such as video and audio. The product was created by 4 Stanford computer science graduates and it is very much targeted at media publishers, from small bloggers to big media companies. One of the customers using Apture is WashingtonPost.com, which we will take a look at in this post.
Examples: Washington Post & Brand South Africa Blog
Apture enables publishers to offer extra third-party content on their website, without the user having to leave the host site. For example in the screenshot below Washington Post has a link to Senator Amy Klobuchar - when the reader hovers over it, up pops up a new window with not only biographical information about Klobuchar, but details on what she's voted on and financial disclosures. Many of the links in the pop-up lead to more information presented inside that same window (the only links which open a new browser window are the blue official website links). It's rather impressive how much extra information is offered in just one little pop-up.
What stood out most to us about Apture though is its ability to present - and manipulate - multimedia. Not only can publishers add links to videos inside an Apture pop-up, but they can select which point in the video to jump to. For example if there's a quote from a Barack Obama video that is relevant to readers, and it starts 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, you can link to and start the video at that 5:10 mark. Below is an example from a government blog in South Africa. You can also see that it opens a separate Apture window for the video - you can have multiple Apture windows on the same page.
Human Editing Trumps Algorithms
Another interesting aspect about Apture is that it relies on publishers to make the ultimate decisions about which media items to add to a webpage. In other words, algorithms don't do all of the work - although they do select the sources for the editors to select from. This is a point of difference from products such as Snap and Adaptive Blue's SmartLinks, which are both fully automated. How Apture works from the publisher's perspective is that editors (at e.g. Washingtonpost.com) select related content, as suggested by Apture's algorithms. The editing work is currently done post-publishing, because Apture hasn't yet found a way to easily integrate into multiple CMSs - although it is working on solving that issue. Right now though, Apture works as a javascript plug-in on the host site, and editors can add pop-ups via their Apture account.
According to Apture CEO media Tristan Harris, Apture has "lowered the cost of inserting a [multimedia] link". He said that the majority of journalists are not technical, in terms of HTML and related web technologies, but that Apture is simple 'point and click' and so it makes it very easy for them to add multimedia. We asked Harris if there is much Semantic technology happening in the back-end. He replied that they do some "semantic guiding" - e.g. when on a book page, Apture pushes up book content in the results presented to editors. But overall, Harris likes to think of Apture as a "hyper-relevant web" technology, rather than semantic web.
Conclusion: Useful and Visually Appealing
We came away impressed by Apture, because of the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated - readers on washingtonpost.com and other Apture sites can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site. Apture is positioning itself as "more than a pop-up site". Actually we still think it's a pop-up technology, but we have to say that it's a sophisticated and useful application of it!
Apture is free for bloggers and works via one line of javascript at the bottom of your site. Although Apture's business model was initially advertising, now the company has turned its attention to premium offerings for big media companies. It is looking for monthly subscription fees from large media companies, in exchange for premium services.
Tell us what you think of Apture - and indeed pop-up technologies in general - in the comments.
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I've found such data-rich popups helpful a handful of times recently, but for the most part I don't like them. They're too intrusive to my mousing experience. Maybe I'm just old school and would sing a different tune after being exposed to the practice more frequently. After all, this is the sort of app I'm being pushed to usher in locally for interactive TV.
Posted by: Jason Salas
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February 16, 2009 5:22 AM
Won't it be easier if this was available as a Wordpress Plugin?
Very cool, but as always I think it'll need more human control to get it just right :)
@Vinod there is a WordPress plugin to make it easy to install.
@Christopher all the links are manually created / edited.
I'm gonna try the Wordpress version.. looks really cool.
I just added this to my personal blog - www.AlexTrup.com and although I only added a few links to the first post (which only appears on the front page for now - not within the post itself - I guess I need to edit on the post itself or something...) I seriously want to cry with joy about how great this tool is. I literally added all those links within a space of 5 minutes (installation was 5 minutes too).
I've used Snap quite a lot before and this is just way more powerful (and of course is different in nature) and I really think we're going to see a lot more people using Apture for blogs or simply some other kind of mashup sites... I'm feeling a bit inspired by this... Going to play with it for the next few days...
It is still a popup, and interferes with the user experience. It requires manipulation to get to the material the user is there to read and is annoying for that reason in the same way other popups are.
It's very interesting and probably a very good service but, I won't pay for it, just wondering what this premium service is about. Why should someone pay for something he can get free with a jquery plugin and a code line?
I'm interested enough in Apture to try it out in Blogger. I'd like to see it work in the Drupal CMS.
I'm a big fan of Apture. It's easy to use, and easy to get going on the blog.
Thanks Richard for the great post.
All, we just posted an updated WordPress plugin here if you'd like to check it out (free, of course):
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/apture/
We hope to democratize and enable anyone to create a more connected media experience, so you can feel, see, hear and understand any topic or idea -- in context.
If you think about the web as a medium, today's "flat" articles of text, with a few images and embedded videos here and there aren't taking advantage of the web's full potential. Apture aims to unlock its untapped potential and enable a whole new type of content consumption experience and instantaneous access to information. The sheer opportunity here is so exciting and we hope you all see the huge potential we do.
@tristanharris
Co-Founder, Apture
I have been using Apture for a couple of weeks now on my site and I am impressed. Anything thinking of trying this, give it a shot.
This really is very instinctive and adds supplementary content very very quickly.
I must say I love Apture. In a way, it is the child of google, creating an even more understandable world where the information one seeks is at one's fingertips. The user-edited content keeps it from becoming annoying, as it remains information that the writer of the article/blog wants the reader to have available. In a nutshell? It's internet footnotes for the internet. I love that it can be used on practically any website you edit, and I love that it truly does exactly what the company claims. It's a beautiful idea executed beautifully.
I've been using it on http://goldencapitalnetwork.blogspot.com/ since last August. Great tool, easy to deploy, and really enriches the user experience, in my experience.
--Ax
Integration in CMS systems is do-able, but the system has to be able to handle the code. ... one of the "hidden costs" of using certain CMS systems, and something you need to ask the vendor BEFORE implementing (or paying for) a system.
Algorithm controlled vs human edited is an interesting dual to balance. For my personal blog, I'm too lazy to essentially edit additional volume of content, but no serious publisher will let an algorithm get away with having the final say on content that lives *in-side* their brand. For that, I applaud their decision to use algorithmic recommendations followed by human editing. Will replace Snap with this over the weekend to see how it plays out!