Apture, a startup by a couple of Stanford students have developed a fairly neat overlay system that’s quite similar to the popups of old.

The difference of course is that Apture has been designed to help people make the web more interactive and allows publishers and bloggers to create a richer multimedia experience.

It allows you to add richer content from other sites, integrate video and audio with the click of a button. In the picture above you can see a snippet from Wikipedia in a popup / overlay. You can imbed Flickr pictures, YouTube videos etc.

The installation is very straight forward, and can be done with a single line of code for most sites.

This type of technology looks very very promising and can expand the amount of information provided on a single site without making it cluttered or redirecting you to other sites.