When your “Make sharing easy” widget needs a search box to sift through all 300 options, it may not be as easy as you think.
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When your “Make sharing easy” widget needs a search box to sift through all 300 options, it may not be as easy as you think.
Juan Pablo
on 16 Sep 10I just hate this kind of sharing widgets, in fact I never use them. Web browsing and sharing should be a easy thing to do, as they told us some years ago “one click away”.
Justin Jackson
on 16 Sep 10Couldn’t agree more.
Luneos
on 16 Sep 10Couldn’t agree more. Why don’t keep simple things really simple, though?
Ryan Fischer
on 16 Sep 10Unfortunately, there are many people who still see giving the user all the options as the right move. I know a lot of developers who are still in this mindset and actually commonly use these types of share this widgets in their applications.
Joe
on 16 Sep 10I complete agree. And its completely inconsistent across sites. The user will already have a simpler way to bookmark or share through the service they actually use; this “feature” is usually pretty redundant.
Daniël W. Crompton
on 16 Sep 10Funny post, I agree completely. I’ve seen a company who links many accounts for sharing to their account ask for your most popular usernames or handles, checks whether they exist on the network they support and just lets you check whether they got the correct network to link to.
Can’t remember which one doe it, but it was very cool.
Tobin
on 16 Sep 10Hope it’s alright to share this, I’ve released an extension for Safari and Chrome which blocks these sharing icons, check it out if you’re interested. http://open-bits.com/shellfish
Aaron Richard
on 16 Sep 10Hard to believe that so many companies like this exist, since I’ve never once used a widget like this.
rich
on 16 Sep 10Hard to believe that there’s that many made up “B” words…
Craig bovis
on 16 Sep 10A simple improvement would be placing the most popular few sites at the top. Even better would be remembering the users most used sites across domains and presenting those first.
Jeppe Sjöström
on 16 Sep 10I disagree completely. Simpler doesn’t always equal easier, and while searching is more complicated I don’t think it’s slower or more difficult than picking from icons.
Typing the first couple letters of your prefered sharing option and getting the right one (granted they provide almost all options) should take you less than 2 sec.
Other ways of sharing is another discussion. I don’t think these widges were meant for hardcore sharers anyway.
Sean McCambridge
on 16 Sep 10lol. How did the web get so noisy?
Radoslav Stankov
on 16 Sep 10I actually don’t think I know a person who will use these. Threat those just like a reminder for the user. Because if he (or she) see the tweeter / facebook logo … it my remind them to tweet it via their favorite twitter client or something like it.
Adam
on 16 Sep 10Beyond the noise of 300 options, including all those sites indicates a lack of understanding of your audience. Find the sites your audiences is using and stick with those.
Luigi Montanez
on 16 Sep 10The only two that matter are Twitter and Facebook. In addition, give the user a short URL that they can copy and paste into whatever they like. We did that here:
http://poligraft.com/BrUR
EH
on 17 Sep 10This has to be a hoax. “100zakladok?” “Blurpalicious?” Either that, or it’s some weird non-US “unclear on the concept” version of a sharing service. The only thing missing is a “select all” checkbox.
EH
on 17 Sep 10Oh God, nevermind. It’s AddThis!
Mark
on 17 Sep 10I would put in Twitter, Facebook and a URL, and allow the user to configure the services they share with.. that way if they use Service X, that always turns up first, even allowing them to remove twitter and face book!
rich
on 17 Sep 10@ Tobin: neat.
Ben
on 17 Sep 10Has it gotten to the point where a site like Woof would actually be popular??
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB-KjL1VfUE
Richard
on 17 Sep 10Good idea for shellfish – need a firefox plugin though. I haven’t tried it since I only use FF. But it would be nice to have something that erases that cluster of crap showing facebook photos that too many people think belong on every f’n page of their sites. It would be the AdBlock Pro of social media!
Tobin
on 17 Sep 10@ Richard – I looked into creating a FF extension, but FF extensions are a lot more work than extensions for Chrome and Safari. Maybe someday, but I don’t have time right now.
Right now, I’m not blocking the facebook photos stuff (on purpose), but I could easily be talked into it. Shoot me a message on the contact us page if you want to discuss further.
Kyle
on 21 Sep 10Aza Raskin had a pretty good proof of concept for dealing with this issue that shows only the “sharing” sites that you’ve actually visited.
SocialHistory.js
This discussion is closed.