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Snap, the service that marketed the concept of previewing a website when a user hovers over the link of that site, has now launched Snap Shots. The Snap Preview Anywhere gathered a lot of slack from bloggers and other users and was later modified to allow preview of selected links, and has now been discontinued in favor of the Snap Shots. The replaced Snap Preview Anywhere was already viewed 9 million times a day.

All in all Snap has launched nine Snap Shots:

• PreviewShot, formerly known as our Snap Preview Anywhere blog widget, shows a preview image of whatever site a link points to.
• WikiShot generates a text summary of a Wikipedia entry on any given subject.
• MovieShot provides pictures, biographies and recent projects on entertainment-related topics, including movies and TV, cast and crew.
• StockShot displays in-depth, updated stock market info in context right at the web site.
• VideoShot allows sites to play video clips, without cluttering layouts with big, static images, or sending users away.
• PhotoShot puts an entire photo album into a Shot, allowing users to view the entire album without having to leave the original site.
• ProductShot automatically shows the Amazon.com listing for a product.
• AudioShot plays .mp3 files within the Shot and also displays information such as the track, the artist, the album art, etc., if available.
• Reuters CompanyNewsShot leverages Reuters’ global news capabilities and the Snap Shot platform to deliver story headlines for publicly-traded companies.

Bloggers and WebMasters could add the Snap Shots to their sites by placing a single line of javascript on every page that they want to enhance. Snap has also created a Snap Shots ecosystem to allow developers to create their own Shots. The Snap Shots ecosystem includes Snap Shot Markup Language (pdf document), and a tagging system inspired by microformats.