Bollocks To Blind Clicks, Every URL Deserves A Preview
“Check out this link: http://bit.ly/QGuBiv ”
If you clicked that, you experienced something dumb but familiar on the web — blindly clicking a link only to end up somewhere you’ve been before or you didn’t want to go.
Come on, Internet. We’re better than this. We’re too busy, and there’s too much beauty, humor, and knowledge abound for us to waste time. Every URL deserves a preview. Who’s gonna make that happen?
Maybe I’ve been spoiled by Facebook and Twitter. Nowadays if you put a link into Facebook it automatically renders a preview complete with page title, thumbnail image, and blurb/lede. That’s awesome. No clicks required and I instantly know if I’ve been to that site already or am interested if I haven’t.
Twitter’s drop-down cards are a smart way to build URL previews into a compacted interface. A single click on the tweet and I get a preview similar to Facebook’s.
Considering we discover a huge chunk of the links we click through social media, the fact that these two services are previewful is huge step in the right direction. But next, the web browsers and mobile operating systems need to get on board.
Web browsers? The fact that there are reams of link preview extensions does not excuse you. This isn’t some niche power user feature, this is web navigation for everyone. Build it in, offer it as a preference. And after that, how about previews of deep links to apps? You shouldn’t have to guess that spotify:track:0c4IEciLCDdXEhhKxj4ThA is the killer new Muse song “Madness” and not a cliff jump into “Call Me Maybe”.
Yes, this could use mobile data and cause some latency, but I’d bet that by pulling metatags like Facebook Open Graph tags, previews could be shown without slurping up too many mobile bytes. Otherwise, I think people would be fine to wait a moment after hovering / holding while at least a page’s title is imported.
For you, that could mean finding the right research to make a big business decision or grabbing some LOLs from a cat you’ve never seen before. Either way, there’s always something to explore. Our tech shouldn’t turn is us into lemmings.