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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

It'll probably stop once this is implemented in browsers, so every article declares a basic set of sharable info, and the social buttons install themselves and read that info. Until then, every one is running in a sandbox, they'll never share info, they'll never allow an intermediary, and they'll all be competing for screen space and article install-base regardless of your existence on a network or the number of networks.

I, for one, find it crazy that I can Like and maybe +1 a blog entry, but I can't Pinboard it or ReadItLater or Orkut it without the site implementing those buttons, despite them all doing roughly the same thing with roughly the same data.

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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.

Well, kind of. Bookmarklets you have to click to use, and perform a strange action to install. An integrated 'share' button could do more, like render those Tweet +1 Like buttons inline, and show if you've already <verb>ed it. And have an infinitely larger install-base; in my mind, this would be built in, and sites you can share to would register themselves with your browser, which would make it a one-click operation for people.

But yeah. Pie in the sky. This would require Google and Facebook (aka, The Internet) to give up absolute control over all that information, which they'd probably fight unless it can demonstrate some other kind of gain.

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.

RockMelt and Flock are both browsers built with sharing in mind. I don't think either of them really caught on, but I'm not sure why.

I quite liked RockMelt, but all the social sharing stuff took up a lot of screen real estate, and (worst of all) made the whole browsing experience quite slow.

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...

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

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