In the ever changing world of Web 2.0 (don’t gag) the amount of gimmick-infused solutions probably doubles every day. Life hacks have become an icon of the modern web and one can’t go a day without running into a solution or tool that’s guaranteed to make your life easier.

Therefore, it’s a breath of fresh air to run across a solution that actually does simplify the browsing experience by making the user’s life a little less complicated. Snap, an Idealab company, located in Pasadena, CA has created a simple JavaScript tool to help developers construct more meaningful links to other sites. Snap simply pops open a preview balloon with a snapshot of the site being linked to whenever a user mouses over a link. This is by no means a new idea, Netflix has been doing it for over a year now with movie descriptions, and Ask.com currently employs a similar technique for their search results. 

Snap’s approach, however, is targeted towards webmasters and developers. By giving the user a snapshot of the site they’re about to link to, Snap claims that they can produce smarter browsing by helping users find the information they’re looking for faster, while at the same time keeping them on the current site longer. Snap continuously crawls the web and archives snapshots of its findings; and if you hover over a link that Snap has not yet archived, the application will do a live lookup via Ajax.

As with all Ajax tools there can be a lag with lookup times, but with broadband at a fairly high concentration this shouldn’t be a big concern.