ShareThere are lots of ways of sharing a hypertext link or a thought on the web, but none of them work the way they should. The current morass of sharing systems include: sharethis, the facebook bookmarklet, the friendfeed bookmarklet, the twitthis bookmarklet, the reddit bookmarklet, the google reader share button, share with notes button, and bookmarklet, delicious (good luck inserting the periods), sociable, and a few hundred dozen others I am probably forgetting (sorry).
Although some of these systems are more elegant than others, they all suffer the same flaw. All of these methods of sharing either assume (a) you want to share the link on just one website community (facebook, friendfeed, twitthis, reddit) or (b) you want to share the link on more than one website community by using multiple clicks, logons, etc. (sharethis, sociable).
The truth is, most of the time I want to share something, I want to share it across all of the communities I belong to with one click. I often want my input to go everywhere, perhaps with some customization. The communities on the other side can decide what’s important to them (using the friendfeed hide function, the reddit vote down function, etc.). Yet there is no tool that lets you easily share a link, thought or idea across all of the different websites out there with one (or a minimal number) of clicks.
C’mon Internet, hurry up and fix this. Like you did last time: my request and the response.
This is where things like feeds should come into play – I covered partial aspects of it here: http://www.andysnotebook.com/2008/04/why-isnt-t... but it’s not the full picture and of course my thoughts have moved on since…
What’s needed is something that can act as a master feed (to avoid the joys of synchronisation), ShareThis could be it for example, then all the other services need to pull in the feed from ShareThis and republish.
The other services would need work though e.g. in Google Reader, you’d need to be able to say that everything from a feed should automatically be shared etc.
It can’t be that hard it’s just that the rate of innovation amongst some of the mainstream products Reader, del.icio.us etc seems glacial compared to the likes of FriendFeed
Hi Ranjit,
Thank you for this valuable feedback. We’re out to make sharing as easy as possible, and this includes providing more and more features for the users. We’d like to provide the user with the ability to set social web preferences so with just one click of the ShareThis button, it will share to wherever you wish around the web. Love to hear any additional thoughts you may have.
Thanks for using ShareThis!
Jeremy Bock
Product Support Engineer
ShareThis