Bring thumbnails to life with SnapCasa

Ever wanted to post a screenshot or thumbnail of a Web site on your blog? Probably not. But if you're like us then this situation comes up all the time. Enter SnapCasa, a service that lets you drop in a preview of any site in one of three thumbnail sizes that will regularly update as time goes on. We debated using a service like this for this year's Webware 100 winner pages, but opted instead to use static images since seeing what Web services looked like years later can be kind of interesting (see Archive.org).

The tool works by having you drop in a special IMG code into your post that links up to SnapCasa's servers. It will pull in updates to that image occasionally--with future versions providing real-time screen grabs and the option to change how big and what format you want the thumbnail to be.

Competing service Snap offers some of these features already with its SnapShots product, but wraps its live screenshots around text links instead of embedded images. I've embedded a few examples below, which should update despite this post gathering dust.

[cawlin]

I integrated thumbnails into my Asaph MicroBlog (http://internetjogging.com/things) in about a minute. So far I am impressed with the speed it is churning out thumbnails, most time a thumbnail spent in que was a couple minutes.

Will be interesting to see if it holds up as more users sign up.