Interclue - New Web Previews App Launches
Back in January, Alex Iskold reviewed a number of 'web previews' tools - including Browster, Cooliris, Snap and Sphere. A couple of others are iReader and Blogrovr, although the latter is more about delivering content than previewing it. We've reviewed several of these web previews products before - e.g. see our post about iReader. Essentially all of these apps aim to save you clicks, by providing a preview of the web page behind a link. Sometimes this type of technology is intrusive, but a lot of times it is useful - because it allows you to check out a preview of the content without clicking through. Indeed a month or so ago we implemented Snap previews on Read/WriteWeb, and I myself regularly use it to preview the blogs of commenters (for example).
So now Interclue has joined what is a reasonably crowded market - and as yet a market where there is little evidence of profitablity. Browster has already bitten the dust. So what makes Interclue different? Like iReader it is a browser add-on that provides more information about a link, including a text summary of the content. Here is an example:
Interclue is very nicely implemented and it doesn't interfere with my browsing. By default you have to hover over or click the little icon to the right of the link to see the content preview, which is much better (in my view) than automatically popping it up when the user passes their mouse over the link. You can modify this behavior, including hover time. Also there is a lot of handy information packed into the previews - a useful text summary, plus some stats about the web page. It also has a del.icio.us tagcloud and digg count, two very nifty features for web 2.0 savvy users.
The current service is free, but CEO Seth Wagoner says there will be a premium subscription based service too. He says it will make Interclue "3-5 times faster and bring you even more clues per pixel."
Check out the Interclue blog for more info, but also try it out and see what you think. Overall I'm definitely impressed with the implementation of web previews in Interclue, but - as with its competition - it remains to be seen if Interclue gets a steady revenue stream. It is a handy tool, but is it one users will pay for?
A final note, this is a web app that hails from New Zealand (where I live). Nice to see web 2.0 startups beginning to pop up here - there are others I have my eye on too.
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I've found that using Interclue in conjunction with web based news aggregators like Google Reader is really handy.
Thanks very much for posting about us Richard. You'll find that the clueviewer activation method is a user configurable option - like almost everything else - but we find that the default set of perferences works pretty well. You can set it so that it's on click, on hover, or when you hover over the link, and change the hover time - power surfers will usually want to drop it down from the default to speed things up. Also if you hold down control you can move through and preview a bunch of links rapidly, which is really handy for say, the ticket list in an intranet, or for a list of search engine results.
I've always found Snap Preview and similar services annoying. If the mouse somehow loiters over one by mistake (like after a scroll), I get a distracting pop up. If I hover a link intentionally, I'm always looking at the status bar to see where the link leads.
Never do I care what the page looks like or is about: If I decide to click it's because the page I'm on convinced me to.
My 2c.
Pierre
Hi Pierre, I'll see your 2c and raise you a dollar :-)
Interclue's default activation method is to show a linkclue icon after 200ms of mouse hovertime on a link, and then a Clueview if the user them hovers for 200ms on the linkclue. In general this means that it's almost impossible to activate the clueview by accident.
All of those settings are configurable, of course. Some people prefer to click the icons, or only use the hotkey.
It's true that previous preview systems and services have got a bad name due to some rather poor usability. Snap Preview was pretty bad when it first came out and left a bad taste in the mouths of many of the digerati. We were stunned when it actually became popular. The image didn't give you any real information, it popped up at random as you moved around the page, and yet people actually installed it into their blogs by choice. We were a bit stunned - if we'd known it was going to be that easy we would have done it ourselves.
The problem would have been generating, storing, and transmitting all those page thumbnails - very costly given the sort of viral growth pattern we expected, while Snap had the advantage of having most of those thumbnails already generated and stored on a high bandwidth network because they were already using them in their search engine. So, we got scooped. C'est la vie. We've always wanted to do readable text previews in our service instead of images anyway, and those are harder to build for any given page. We're working on it.
By the way, with the Interclue addon the user can choose to show thumbnails as well as text, but only if the images are available from the selected free page thumbnail service. We will probably build our own thumbnail server eventually to get around this problem. But the text is more important than the image.
iReader, Browster, and Cooliris launched their addons with usability flaws and itererated from there - exactly what we should have done. In general they all acheived a certain level of usability for some pages, but with problems on a lot of others. Interclue still has problems on a few pages, but it's definitely ahead of all the other products on the market. We didn't launch until we had been through 3 major coding iterations and solved all the major usability problems you have seen with other products and services in this space, and all the problems I introduced by relentlessly adding more features when we should have been focused on launching as soon as possible!
You should take a few minutes and give Interclue a try. It's really a lot better than looking at the status bar, and it's free. If you don't like it, then it uninstalls quickly and painlessly.
Cheers,
Seth.
Hi Seth,
Thanks for the reply! I'll give Interclue a try when I get a chance. We'll see how it fares :) I'll leave feedback through it or here or your blog...
The other thing to consider, again based on Snap but applying to all these services, is the extra load they add on the target servers. It may be the odd preview here and there, but if a site goes virally popular and can barely support the traffic, the previews are just an extra kick. Personally, I block Snap's bot completely using robots.txt. If I see excessive traffic from other services, they'll get the robots chop too. So far so good!
Cheers,
Pierre
Pierre, blocking InterClue would be self-defeating. It won't preview a site unless I explicitly tell it to. If I tell it to, and you're blocking me, I won't be going to your site.
That is, surely it's the user you're punishing, not the tool?
I don't know about Snap's behaviour, never liked what was written about it enough to try it. Blocking something that jus t pillages your site whether the user wants it to or not is fair enough!