Comments on: The social agent, part 4: Share

By: Mark Cross

Mark Cross — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:19:39 +0000

I seem to “remember” 99% of these “sharing” ideas were actually in the University of Graz’s Hyper-G protocol in 95/96… But then the sheeple came along and determined the landscape. And we got the browser wars. A great victory for capitilism, but a crushing defeat for creativity

Chris, please keep up the stirling work you do of banging heads together. I don’t think I would ever have the patience.

By: sabret00the

sabret00the — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:41:35 +0000

Absolutely loving this, amazing work. What is the chance of this being implemented and when by? I mean just how much of a concept is this? Are we likely to be using this functionality by Firefox 4? Even in extension form?

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:13:55 +0000

While they’ve been done as browser extensions and bookmarklets, eventually you realize that the lack of ubiquity of a certain verb in a UI is what’s hold back innovation — because web apps can’t focus on more pressing issues, rather than how many sharing chicklets they have on their site. Furthermore, the presence of such extensions indicate that perhaps this is functionality that SHOULD be made native — rather than ducttaped on after the fact.

I get your points about the “Mail This” functionality, and wouldn’t want it to go away per se. In fact, if you look at the dialog, you can see that email would still be a first class citizen for addressing people in the browser.

Still, for folks who use other channels more often than email, there needs to be smoother integration. Currently the way you tweet or send a Facebook message is janky at best — undiscoverable at worst. If you sign in to your cloud provider, all of your message-sending settings are automatically imported — no need to ever fiddle with SMTP or IMAP again.

It may also be true that the social agent I’ve described isn’t for everyone — but I imagine if I gave this kind of experience to my less-techy friends, they’d probably appreciate how easy it would be to get up and running and just use the thing, rather than futzing with settings that they never need (or don’t understand).

By: jens

jens — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:03:33 +0000

I like this series, but this post lacked oomph. The UI ideas you show have all been done already as browser extensions or bookmarklets. I’m not sure what value there is in hardcoding them in the browser; it would just slow down innovation.

In defense of the “Mail Link To This Page” command: it’s great for sending a link to one specific person. Everyone has email already, even my parents who would never use Twitter or even Facebook. And if I’m going to send email, I want to do it from — surprise — my preferred email app, not some browser’s quick-and-dirty dialog box. Would that dialog box support styled text? Would it let me pick from my address book? Would it know what SMTP server to use, or make me configure that yet again in its prefs? Would it secretly put embarrassing boilerplate in the message like “Your buddy $MYNAME thought you’d get a kick out of this!”?

By: Justin Thorp

Justin Thorp — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:26:40 +0000

Chris, great post. Definitely see that sharing will play an important role in the future of the browser.

With AddThis, almost a year ago, we launched a browser toolbar (http://addthis.com/tools) that enabled sharing of any website to any of the sharing services we support.

It’s been tremendously successful. It’s seeing great adoption and ,on average, people with the toolbar share 39x more than someone who shares with the AddThis button. (http://bit.ly/9zsurY)

We’re definitely looking for ways that we can continue to evolve it and add more functionality for our users. You have a lot great ideas in this post. We’d be excited to work with anyone who’d like to riff on this topic further.