On 10/6/2010 9:55 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
Yeah, that had its uses, so why was that removed? Deemed annoying?
I've tried to research what's the best way to do "share this" buttons and there isn't any clear data or consensus on this. Collapsing the various share icons into one popup is probably the most extensible / least annoying.
Well, I do think the large buttons on the left looked more like "wikispaces" than "wikipedia" (more commercial) but I thought they looked great. It might be nice to see more of that style in other places.
As for social sharing, that's more complicated. I know of a site (that you've probably never heard of) that was lucky enough to get on the list of social media share buttons that came with a popular wordpress plugin, and they got a number of backlinks that was absolutely staggering -- and then they got hacked by some S.E.O. spammers who turned it into their own private playground. The site was ranking well for many search terms and presumably getting quite a bit of traffic and also boosting the rankings of the spammers' sites, but it got zapped when somebody uploaded malware to the site. The site owners were basically absentee landlords and if there were any honest people contributing to the site they didn't do anything about it.
Today any idiot can install Pligg and have a Digg clone running in a few hours, and I'm sure there's something out there for making a delicious clone too. So if you make a list, you're in this awful position of picking winners and losers. You could make a case that Facebook is so big that it's sufficient to have a Facebook button -- but there's people out there who really hate Facebook. Now you might say "Facebook", "Twitter", "Digg", "Reddit", "StumbleUpon", "Delicious". Well, some people hate Digg so much that they'll still complain... There probably are thousands or tens of thousands of 'sharing' sites out there, and you can't draw a clear line between ones that are "big enough", the ones that are somebody's web-spam project (it isn't hard to make a flock of electric sheep that can beat the average Digger at the Turing Test), and ones that are just too little to matter... Not without offending somebody, and in a consensus-driven organization, that's a problem.
There's also the question of what value sharing buttons bring. For something to get traction in social media, it's got to be not just cool, but ~really~ cool, and what plays depends entirely on the community. For instance, I've got a certain content stream that consistently gets 5-10 votes in reddit and brings in maybe 500-5000 visitors. I submit the same stuff to Digg or Mixx and I might get 5 or 15 visitors. Part of that is that I've got a good account in reddit, but some content just does well in some communities and doesn't in others.
For a project I'm working on, I'm seriously thinking about a "Facebook-only" approach. I know that would drive some people nuts, but I own the site lock, stock and barrel and I can do what I want. Not everybody has that freedom.