GMail does something very smart with the Sponsored Links it displays in the Webclips area just above the message view area, it lets the user scroll back and forth among the ads.

Maybe I’m an odd one for actually looking at ads on occasion, but sometimes they do tell you about helpful or interesting information and services. So I like to click on them sometimes. However, more often than not, I just glance at them in the corner of my eye as I am about to move to another page. What then happens is that the ad changes. In GMail, I can just click on the back button in Webclips and get the ad (or whatever RSS feed I may have missed).

On most sites this is not possible (e.g. Yahoo! Mail). If you click the back button of your browser, chances are that some other ad is dynamically generated on the page you were just viewing by the time you return to it. It’s a bummer as some of those ads could be of interest to users a split second later.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 10:49 am and is filed under IT/Comm, Products/Services, Web sites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.