I tried Snap.com on this blog for a week or so and asked readers to give me feedback. I got one comment supporting the tool; all the rest hated it. They didn’t just dislike it or prefer my blog without it. They loathed it.

So I was skeptical when I read that Snap.com had introduced SnapShots, which turns links into widgets. They still work with mouseovers, but an icon indicates that a mouseover is available, making them easy to avoid. (The regular Snap.com feature produced a pop-up whenever you moused over any link, which is what drove people crazy.)

SnapShots provides live data from a website, which means you can consume anything from a YouTube video to a stock chart from directly within the pop-up. Since you can indicate that a pop-up is available—and restrict their use to only those links you want, rather than have every link pop up a window—it seems to be a far more useful feature.

There are eight SnapShot modules available right now, with more added regularly—one was just recently introduced that offers Reuters company news articles that delivers Reuters content about your publicly traded company. Others include summaries of Wikipedia entries (sort of an on-demand glossary), stock charts, YouTube videos, photo albums, Amazon.com product listings, and MP3 files.

Here are two examples, one of a a Youtube video showing one of the prototypes from the recently launched Coca-Cola Virtual Thirst desighn competition, the other a Wikipedia definition of “podcasting.”

Some additional coverage of Snapshots is here.