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).

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!”?

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.

Most solutions to data syncing (such as Dropbox, Firefox Weave, Git) that I enjoy follow a distributed mind set. There is an online master server, but all of my clients are kept up to date, and if the server is down, I can use another client as a server until it comes back up.

As for providers syncing, I do hope we come up with a format that all providers are willing to read and write. Data portability is so important this day and age.