Snap! Annoying or hecka cool?

Oh,
Snap! Not like this is the most amazing, rare conceptually mind-altering thing I have seen in a while, but I do think it prods out a good question: Is this really a good idea?
I like the idea of providing additional context. Frankly, I must admit that I don't know exactly how Snap works. I am curious as to whether it grabs a preview of the exact page to which you are linking, or if it just pulls the homepage, and if you can control what it pulls. From
reading their FAQ, it looks like it uses a CSS class to bind the methods to, which is the right way to do stuff such as this, IMO.
Anyway, here is my bet: this type of popup is going to become extremely prevalent in the next 6 months. We are already deploying something of this nature at
The Bank. There have been plugins for Firefox that added this functionality to Google for a while now. Yahoo uses similar kinds of functionality both in YM and on their news pages.
Labels: dhtml, interaction, interesting, ux