Comments on: Apture Gives Contextual Popups A Good Name

By: CrunchBase API Stats and Apps

CrunchBase API Stats and Apps — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:58:52 +0000

[...] is a startup trying to bring “depth to the web” with contextual popups that require no browser plugin. The product’s blog integration provides a very visual and [...]

By: iren

iren — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 04:40:30 +0000

Какие положительные результаты

By: Игорь Корнеев

Игорь Корнеев — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:13:39 +0000

Люблю посты в таком духе! Спасибочки

By: xavierv

xavierv — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:58:09 +0000

Apture did a hell of a good job adding a layer of common knowledge on anybody’s blog. It’s a change in user’s habits, but aren’t we all 2.0 geeks here: I don’t see how a pop up window can scare us. It’s way less of a change than video commenting is, and I don’t see too many complaints there.

Plus for publishers, in terms of traffic, visitors are not clicking away from their pages to see a related wikipedia article and getting lost in the abyss of the long tail. That makes a hell of a difference. I’ve been using Apture for almost two months now, and it really is a breeze.

By: Niklas’ blog » Blog Archive » Sun-day: sun, Apture, The Jealous Girlfriends and Serbia looming

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:29:09 +0000

[...] for free to anybody, and a product video tour is available here. TechCrunch has covered it here. The product - so far, having used it for 24 hours - works magnificently and adds a lot more value [...]

By: Apture – links y contenido relevante para tu website

Apture – links y contenido relevante para tu website — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:33:53 +0000

[...] techcrunch No hay etiquetas para esta [...]

By: Kristján

Kristján — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:16:58 +0000

Protip: The settings button in the lower left of the Apture windows lets you:

-Disable open on hover
-Disable animation
-Disable Apture entirely

So there’s no need to continue whining.

By: Frank Church

Frank Church — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:14:51 +0000

@Tegan
Noscript it is!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

Everyone should customize their own web experience.

By: Rob Olson

Rob Olson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:40:48 +0000

After seeing this demoed I was really impressed. I think it can genuinely add value to the content on the website. I almost missed the part of the article saying its open to the public now. I will try it out.

However, I really dislike things that happen on rollover and believe that they should be limited to activation on click.

By: A Funk

A Funk — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:53:44 +0000

bringing back relevance to adds while providing value to readers is going to be the future of advertising. Free content will always be monetized in some way and for a publisher you want to get paid but not annoy your readers. It will be interesting to see where this goes

By: ariel mcnichol

ariel mcnichol — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:42:24 +0000

This is HOT and has good timing. Yahoo may have done this two years ago, but the feed content wasn’t compelling enough yet. Now the feeds to the videos, music and maps deliver inline quite nicely.

By: po

po — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:32:12 +0000

http://shortcuts.yahoo.com/ did that two years ago

By: Tegan

Tegan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:20:43 +0000

I don’t see the links. I surf with the Firefox add-on “NoScript”, and I enable (usually temporarily enable) sources as needed in order to get the functionality that I want from a site — provided that I know the functionality is there to want.

I don’t have the answer to this issue — it’s hard enough to articulate it — but if apture’s stuff is going to work, there should be something to make it evident that the links are there.

It would/will be easy to say that it’s my loss, if I choose to surf with features turned off by default, but I do enable sources as I become aware of them, site by site, and finding a way to let me know that something is there and worth enabling would presumably be to the benefit of the page’s author/sponsor/developer/owner (whomever).

By: Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:09:07 +0000

I do think that the Snap previews could be improved, but they don’t exactly change throw user expectations off (links still go to pages). Btw, if you want to turn them off, there’s an option for that in the Snap popup.

By: Kevin H

Kevin H — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:51:44 +0000

They don’t work in the google reader feed of this page, either.

By: silicon valley dropout

silicon valley dropout — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:26:41 +0000

is this best a group of stanford computer science folks could do?

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:20:55 +0000

Like a number of people who’ve commented before me, I think that this quote is a bit odd considering the usage of Snap Shots:

I’m generally not pleased when a user interface does something I didn’t intend it to do.

This looks okayish. I like the fact that there’s a delay in the popups appearing on hover. But that could bode badly too: folks may be less aware of what’s made that popup box pop up. Also, the “close” button is hard to notice for someone less savvy.

I think this is prossibly just a stupid gimmick. “Contextual Popups” and “Good” rarely go together in a sentence.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:56:12 +0000

This is an interesting idea, but I think they can take it further. Why not let the user select what they want? I can select a couple of words and a pop-up comes out with reference to those words.

Maybe I’m not interest in Redmond, Washington but in San Mateo, California.

By: Peter Urban

Peter Urban — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:45:26 +0000

I think this is very cool, yes it requires you to get the pop-up = advertising association out of your head but I very often want to get some quick background info on something I am reading and having to go somewhere else is usually annoying and disruptive. The only thing that might be tricky is that the publisher might add links to thing I don’t need background on and vice versa. A feature where I as a reader can highlight a phrase and the right-click trigger a pop-up with that kind of background to the phrase would be ultra cool…. Maybe as a browser plug-in in combination what they’ve done so far.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:54:24 +0000

@ Sandeep: Like Kontera? Did you watch the video? It’s a publishing tool with editor chosen content.

By: Sandeep

Sandeep — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:48:52 +0000

konera came up with this kindof product 2-3 years ago. http://contentlink.com/ does the same thing. And yes, it is annoying.

Changing reader’s browsing habits is not an easy task. Its like asking people to stop eating hamburgers and instead force them to go with Southbeach diet

By: Rantan

Rantan — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:19:01 +0000

Revenue model? Also … would be cool to incorporate a definition/thesaurus function as well … I guess that would be more on the browser plug-in side of things. But it could be an interesting extension (for reach) for these guys.

By: You SEO partner

You SEO partner — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:15:11 +0000

I think this is pretty cool, as a website developer I cant wait to incorporate this in to my website. I like it better that you dont have to click on it but just put your mouse over it thats cool.

By: Sanjay Vakil

Sanjay Vakil — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:04:30 +0000

“See those links? If you click on them, popups will appear that shed light on what they reference”

That’s incorrect.

The correct sentence would read:

“See those links? If you MOVE YOUR POINTER OVER them, popups will appear that shed light on what they reference”

And that difference is what makes them incredibly annoying.

By: carlo

carlo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:04:13 +0000

“Hey Mark, do you mean like the really annoying snap shot pop ups all over techcrunch that try to direct you to the annoying crunchbase site that no one really wants to go to?”

THANK YOU! It’s like scanning a page for land mines.

These lazy inline context plugins are just annoying. Feel free to junk up your site with them if you want but you had better give me a way to turn them off in the css, otherwise im out. I don’t need supplimental info pushed at me, if I want to know something more I’ll open a new tab. No more link mines!