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Comment by mkuhn | Hacker News Reader

Its nice how the 4*20 requests problem has been solved during the redesign. Now the individual Buttons are only loaded if someone really wants to use them and is hovering over the dummy buttons.

I found that quite nifty and unobtrusive. A smart solution to the problem.

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It is much better than having two clicks (which I had prototyped), but the prob is that a lot of portable devices don't have 'hover' - so I don't know if it falls back on anything in that case.

There is a product here - package the buttons together so they only load once, hide them in some way by default, and provide a bunch of analytics. Lots of blogs and websites would pay for that - the current solutions for social button analytics are really bad, or non-existant (you need to know things like click-through rates, which share options are most popular, autohiding some for users who never use them, detect if the user is logged in for each service, how many followers/likes/retweets etc. each user gets from a share so you can identify 'power sharers' etc.) - I don't think that exists.

You can't just keep adding more and more buttons for each social service, and there are some people who will only use, for eg. delicious or pinboard and there are no buttons for them.

I guess http://www.addthis.com/ kind of does this and has a "fallback" option to integrate many services.

Mobile is definitely a problem but the mobile version of the website makes that solveable for the most popular devices.

I guess it's a matter of taste but i find the addthis button bar rather horrible to look at. Plus it does not have nearly the feature set that Nic is looking for. I agree there's a product there.

Share function belongs in the browser or in Web Intents. It would be less work for all the sites, consistent UX for users, and much better page load speed.

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