When Will The Social Sharing Button Madness Stop

Although I think your point about design is very astute, I disagree with your assertion that those who need to hear this are lost cases.

I have seen some insanely huge, hover as you scroll social sharing panels on blogs of people whom I consider to be luminaries in the field of technology and design. Maybe it's a case of outsourcing the blog design or using templates just because they are there... Let's face it: slapping together a Wordpress template plus Disqus comments and some other frills then calling it 'web design' is all too common these days.

I think that getting some dialogue going on the topic is very worthwhile and I ask that people like yourself, with such astute observations on the topic not take the shoulder shrugging stance and speak out.

Regarding Ghostery, there is really no way of observing what is being logged and what isn't on the server. Only some sort of legal inquiry can reveal that (eg what happened with Facebook in Ireland)

You could also use noscript or disable third party cookies in browser settings if you really don't want social media buttons.

If you haven't already, check out "request policy".

It's a plugin I'm using in FF alongside noscript. It makes browsing kind of noisy, but educational. As with your observation about 'like' buttons, I notice the more craptastic sites often try to pull content from 10+ other domains. ( Request policy stops these cross domain requests until approved )

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/requestpolicy...

You can still, however, make your own buttons using the API calls from the related social sites. You do not have to use the standard buttons provided. This way you can avoid all the privacy issues.

I had the idea about 5 years back that it would be nice to share via the browser any kind of content with one's primary email contacts list. There could even be shortcuts or predictive text (like in Gmail when you start to enter someone's email address). Think of it like a box, much like the search box in Safari's top right corner where you could select 'article', 'video', etc from a dropdown and then start typing the email you wish, click send and violá.

Perhaps this already exists in some form. Perhaps a Pocket for your friends where you put things on a secondary reading list of theirs so as not to get confused with their own list.

Isn't this basically what bookmarklets are supposed to do?

Facebook's open graph tags are everywhere (you kindof need them to make "like" work properly), and what you're describing could be implemented using a javascript bookmarklet that read the tags.

Many social sites offer a bookmarklet or browser extension (or at least a 3rd party implements something via API).

Firefox has a first-party experimental addon to do this. You can try it out here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-share...

The worst is when the "share" link links to the blog's homepage and not the permalink. I always feel like an ass when I do that to people.

Good point! It seems that what would make most sense is to move the sharing buttons onto the browser, no?

Mobile Safari does a great job of this with the bookmark/mail link to this page/add to home screen/etc. button, heck even Twitter is catered for as of iOS5. Maybe if desktop browsers had similar functionality we'd see less of this noise on the page.

Good deal that too: get the crud off the actual page and sacrifice but one toolbar button that (like the search bar) has a pull down with all of your selected networks. That makes it more elegant in appearance and opt-in by default.

...seems so obvious, maybe there are already extensions for this?

The URL bar is Deep Magick to most people, requiring rituals most foul and loathsome to work with, such as the forbidden incantation of Copius Pastious. Less than one in ten simple villagers understand such vile sorcery, and most of those can only use it via the Scroll of Copius Pastious conveniently inserted into the Word Ribbon by the Mad Monks of Microsoftine.

Less sardonically, even techies seem to get their share-this-with-people neurotransmitters activated by seeing sharing widgets. Its a call to action. People respond to those. My subjective experience back when Delicious buttons didn't suck was that for two roughly equivalent pieces of geek-friendly reference material putting the Delicious button on was worth 10x Delicious saves.

(I hate all the other buttons and rarely use them. That might well be irrational -- I've heard on HN from folks at e.g. TechCrunch that they're worth measurable money to the business.)

Yes, they are. They're in Chrome 19, if you're inclined to try them out, and the Chrome Web Store already has a bunch of extensions that use them. (Search for 'intents' or use the intent picker's suggestions)

"Share via barcode" can be useful. Say you want to tell someone some contact info for you, but neither of you currently have any contact info on the other. If your phones have screens and can read barcodes, which I presume they can, no need for one of you to say some number or email address while the other types it in. One person just shares via barcode, and then the person that just got that contact info shares theirs back using that contact info.

Also, emailing or texting links to someone right there at the table with you contributes to needless inbox clutter.

It's a particularly irritating damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. Avoid using buttons on your site? Then, as another poster pointed out, you don't get nearly as many shares, and your page views go down. Use buttons on your site? They slow your page down and, yes, your page views go down.

My experience is that with tweaking and sane numbers of buttons, b) costs you less visitors than a), but it's still a pain in the posterior.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's really about good design and placement of the buttons. The buttons themselves, however, are extremely important to the flow of information through different mediums.

> Those buttons do serve a very important purpose, which is to make it simple for visitors to share information.

Isn't it simple enough already? I mean, can you see a case where a visitor is like, "Man I'd love to share this post on Facebook, but opening up Facebook itself is just too much trouble."?

Exactly. You shouldn't slap a ton of these buttons on your site and assume your maximizing your sharing potential. The 3 share links I have on imgfave.com drive 10x the traffic of the addthis widget that I used previously. I tried using the facebook like button, but the share link I have on their now drives 15x as much traffic as the like button, even though it takes two steps to post back to facebook. Important to make no assumptions and keep testing.

Sorry to disagree here, but it's not quite that simple.

The buttons are here to stay because people want traffic and _buttons measurably increase traffic_.

I hope that they get faster and more friendly, but until they stop providing a traffic boost, bloggers will keep using them.

I think DNT+ (http://abine.com/dntdetail.php) also solves this problem...

And sells your data too.

Was just trying to show how quickly things change, since a year or so ago, every site had that digg button as well. Guess it didn't really read that way

Was a little confused about this too. Made me check the publishing date.

Yes, it was a rant I had after going to this other site, or sites for that matter.

You're going to need way more than that for all their subdomains, CDN, CDN's subdomains, etc. Not to mention having to keep it all up to date in case they roll out a new domain.

That said, I use the same technique. :)

So, if you just add the localhost address to etc hosts then nothing from the url will load in your browser?