Do you encourage your site visitors to AddThis or ShareThis?

Facilitating content sharing is nothing new, and there are many services out there to help bloggers or site owners encourage the sharing of their content. In addition to the buttons mentioned above, there are also scripts such as mooSocialize, and there are numerous wordpress bookmarking plug-ins.

So how do you choose?

A few considerations:

1. prominence. how important is this feature to surface
2. site look/visual integrity. this may relate to prominence.
3. breadth of offering. how many services can you promote to, how many are relevant
4. ease of integration. can you add it to your site easily?
5. analytics. does this thing work? so what?

I will admit, I shy away from AddThis purely because I don’t like the button they provide. Yes, I’m that shallow. For me, social sharing is a service to offer my visitors, but it’s not that important to my overall goals. I wanted a solution that added to, rather than detracted from, the overall look of my site. I didn’t want to hit people over the head with it.

I currently use the sociable plugin for wordpress, which has a tremendous amount of services to choose from. You can customize which to show, the order thereof, and other aspects of the display as well.

As a wordpress plugin, it was very easy to add to my site. As a developer, this isn’t generally a breaking point for me, but it may be for others.

The one drawback that I see with this plugin is that it doesn’t offer the analytics that both AddThis and ShareThis do. ShareThis gives a site owner the opportunity to look at button views and clicks, as well as click-through ratios, most popular content and more. Obviously if a site is doing any sort of analytics they will be able to gather some of this information, but just knowing how often people are considering sharing your content, and to where, could also be of interest.

Those are a few of the things I think about when deciding on a social sharing strategy. How about you? What do you use, and why?

Another question asked in the Q&A section of LinkedIn. My response:

Disclaimer: I am assuming here you’re talking about a destination site like facebook or myspace, rather that a service like twitter.

There are some rudimentary features that help contribute to the overall success of a social networking site. Obviously, #1 is the ease of social interaction. This involves:
- How can people find and make connections within the site?
- How can people invite people who are not currently members?
- How can people communicate?

Personalization is also a major factor. MySpace users pimp out their pages as a form of self-expression. Facebook held off for awhile, but now they have 9439023829 applications people can add.

Data portability is huge right now as well. If you want your site to be the premiere destination, give users the opportunity to import information from other sites. I already have established services for blogging, microblogging, etc. Make it easy for me to share my work elsewhere within your space.
On the flip side, make it easy for me to help promote you and what I do in your space. Let me export my activities or have a publicly available URL for my profile so I can use your service to help engage outside of it (and I’ll even help drive traffic to your site! We both win!)

So those are a few basic features I believe a social network site needs to have to best support their user base. Ha, notice I didn’t mention anything specific about content.. I think that’s more specific to the user base.

Today I received a spam-like email:

from {CrypticSN@gmail.com}
{CrypticSN} invited you to be their friend.

Click here to go to My Latest Piece where {CrypticSN} found you.

I looked at the URL for the link, and it did redirect to “mylatestpiece.com”. Being the cynical “don’t click links in email” person that I am, I typed in the address and checked it out.

Lo and behold, it’s one of the google friend connect examples I checked out a few weeks back! {CrypticSN} is listed there under my “new friend requests” in the little iframe.

I haven’t thought too much about google friend connect since the few posts I wrote about it. This generic email has me really surprised, for a few reasons.

1. It’s incredibly generic. Since it’s a friend request, I may or may not know {CrypticSN}. So sending an email from their email address may not prevent the request from a quick trip to the spam filter.
2. There is no mention of the community aspects of the site. Granted, it’s an example, but “My Latest Piece” doesn’t lend itself to being a destination I’ll be making friends at. That being said, if I were really a community member at My Latest Piece, I would probably recognize the site name and the fact that there is a notion of “friending” there.
3. Where do my friend requests go? This is the part that I think still is a major concern for GFC. If I friend {CrypticSN} here, where does that information live? Do I need to invite him to be a friend on other GFC sites, or on other networking sites? Indeed, can I?

The ability to find and request friends is clunky. There doesn’t appear to be an search functionality, so you have to navigate through “previous” and “next” links of current members to find the one you’re looking for. You may then look at their profile, including their friends, and request their friendship. There is no option for a personal note, just a confirmation asking if you’re sure you want to send a request.

I know this is a new service, but come on. The mode for managing contacts and sending messages to people has been done before. There are strategies and models that are tried and tested. What is the goal here, to find people you may know, or generically spam other people and foster a “friendship” in which you can’t even complement someone on their avatar when you “befriend” them.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I still fail to see the user benefits to this whole deal. While it may be great for My Latest Piece that I just returned to their site, as a user, this whole exchange has been less than satisfying.

I would explain to {CrypticSN} that it’s not him, it’s me, but I clicked “ignore” on the invite, which evidently means “hide this invite and give me no way to retrieve it.” You know, Ignore as in Delete…

Today I was walking someone through the Google Friend Connect examples. I’m always logged into Google, so I wasn’t aware of the number of authentication steps that are required to actually use GFC. We had to go to the appropriate site, then sign into google. THEN register with the appropriate social network. At the first sample site we hit, the “sign in” link didn’t appear to work. At the next site, we signed in, but the progress icon spun and spun — something was going on behind the scenes. The entire process was quite tedious, and I couldn’t imagine having to do it time and again.

It appears that the general belief of all these social network data portability initiatives is that data can be ported between the platforms. Obviously I’ve done the most research into Google Friend Connect, but from what I’ve seen, this is not the case. The big players all introduced their own solution to the same problem, but none of them (as far as I understand) were recommending a communal platform.

So far? Underwhelmed.

My thoughts are premature, because I haven’t actually seen Google Friend Connect (GFC; can I call it GFC?) in action, I’ve only seen the few screenshots that google has released. That being said, I thought I’d respond to my impressions or understandings of the service, before seeing what it really is. That way if I’m wrong, I can claim ignorance

In a press release, it was stated that “Google Friend Connect is about helping the ‘long tail’ of sites become more social.” The idea was that “without requiring coding experience”, GFC (geez, I’m totally hurting my search engine ranking by not spelling that out) would provide site maintainers with a way to tap into the benefits of social networks, attracting and engaging more visitors.

As a developer, implementation is always in my mind. I’m interested in how a series of widgets or wizards magically add “social” to your site. When you’re working on a specific platform (say, facebook or myspace), you can tap into a known architecture and codebase to aid in the integration. (facebook apps, wordpress plugins). When you’re not, well, is it really an integrated solution?

Pluck already does a good job at offering blogs, forums and other social goodies to sites, either via javascript or an API. People have long been able to add polls and forums to their sites via services like bravenet or dreambook (remember when it was all the rage to have a guestbook? Now THAT was engagement!) The functionality may be the basically the same, so what’s the big draw?

It’s the data. Isn’t everything about the data these days? Pluck or any other third-party hosted widget has the data living… somewhere. To a user, it may seem like that blog post or poll is on your site, but if it’s being pulled in using javascript, the good ole Google crawler isn’t going to associate it with your site.

Hm… the google crawler… may not index all the information associated with your site (blog postings, reviews, comments) if it’s hosted by a third party social site, if it gets pulled in dynamically.. but what if google DID? What if google provided the hooks into the social stuff? I will definitely be interested to see if they’ve figured this piece of it out. They wrote the rules, so it will be interesting to see if they get re-written.

Update: an article on ReadWriteWeb states that the social magic will be added in via iframe.. so much for my high hopes of making the social in your site actually seem like your site. I thought we’d all communally agreed back about 5 years ago that iframes were evil?

The other consideration about data is related to personal data. Right now a site implementing third-party software retains control of the data. A site integrating a third party product may or may not have the same control. It appears that one limitation with MySpace’s Data Availability initiative is that MySpace retains the control over the data is makes available. If a site implements GFC, can the user hook into one or more existing social networks, and how are any actions taking place on the host site being tracked? I think of Disqus, which centralizes blog comments. When I respond (after having authenticated) to a blog posting where the author has set up disqus, my comments are stored as part of my disqus profile. Disqus purports to “makes your comments more interactive for readers and easier to manage for you — all while connecting your community with other blogs.” - but it does this largely on its own domain. Will google.com/friendconnect serve as a landing pad for user behaviours online? Currently it appears that that is what is the distinguishing feature between Google’s *connect feature, as opposed to the recent offerings by Facebook and MySpace.
Another consideration with the lack of an existing primary platform is how conflicting information will be resolved. I will admit that I don’t yet have a clear understanding how GFC will tie into the authentication of other sites, if a user will be able to select one platform with which to associate (and from which his friends and preferences will migrate), or if he will be able to pick and choose. Just two days ago there was an article in ReadWriteWeb stating that filtering is the next step for social media. We are at a breaking point with too much duplicating information out there, and now we need to do through the tedious work to de-dupe and validate. I don’t have a clear sense what the GFC strategy is for assigning friends to groups with varying levels of privileges, and how referential integrity across platforms may be ensured (if Melissa de-friends iKeif on facebook, what happens to his access to her data on my site?)

I will be very interested to see how this all plays out.. I’ll be eager to read the full reports from the few whitelisted sites that will be trying things out.