This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.

I just hate this kind of sharing widgets, in fact I never use them. Web browsing and sharing should be a easy thing to do, as they told us some years ago “one click away”.

Couldn’t agree more.

Couldn’t agree more. Why don’t keep simple things really simple, though?

Unfortunately, there are many people who still see giving the user all the options as the right move. I know a lot of developers who are still in this mindset and actually commonly use these types of share this widgets in their applications.

I complete agree. And its completely inconsistent across sites. The user will already have a simpler way to bookmark or share through the service they actually use; this “feature” is usually pretty redundant.

Funny post, I agree completely. I’ve seen a company who links many accounts for sharing to their account ask for your most popular usernames or handles, checks whether they exist on the network they support and just lets you check whether they got the correct network to link to.

Can’t remember which one doe it, but it was very cool.

Hope it’s alright to share this, I’ve released an extension for Safari and Chrome which blocks these sharing icons, check it out if you’re interested. http://open-bits.com/shellfish

Hard to believe that so many companies like this exist, since I’ve never once used a widget like this.

Hard to believe that there’s that many made up “B” words…

A simple improvement would be placing the most popular few sites at the top. Even better would be remembering the users most used sites across domains and presenting those first.

I disagree completely. Simpler doesn’t always equal easier, and while searching is more complicated I don’t think it’s slower or more difficult than picking from icons.

Typing the first couple letters of your prefered sharing option and getting the right one (granted they provide almost all options) should take you less than 2 sec.

Other ways of sharing is another discussion. I don’t think these widges were meant for hardcore sharers anyway.

lol. How did the web get so noisy?

I actually don’t think I know a person who will use these. Threat those just like a reminder for the user. Because if he (or she) see the tweeter / facebook logo … it my remind them to tweet it via their favorite twitter client or something like it.

Beyond the noise of 300 options, including all those sites indicates a lack of understanding of your audience. Find the sites your audiences is using and stick with those.

The only two that matter are Twitter and Facebook. In addition, give the user a short URL that they can copy and paste into whatever they like. We did that here:

http://poligraft.com/BrUR

This has to be a hoax. “100zakladok?” “Blurpalicious?” Either that, or it’s some weird non-US “unclear on the concept” version of a sharing service. The only thing missing is a “select all” checkbox.

Oh God, nevermind. It’s AddThis!

I would put in Twitter, Facebook and a URL , and allow the user to configure the services they share with.. that way if they use Service X, that always turns up first, even allowing them to remove twitter and face book!

@ Tobin: neat.

Has it gotten to the point where a site like Woof would actually be popular??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB-KjL1VfUE

Good idea for shellfish – need a firefox plugin though. I haven’t tried it since I only use FF. But it would be nice to have something that erases that cluster of crap showing facebook photos that too many people think belong on every f’n page of their sites. It would be the AdBlock Pro of social media!

@ Richard – I looked into creating a FF extension, but FF extensions are a lot more work than extensions for Chrome and Safari. Maybe someday, but I don’t have time right now.

Right now, I’m not blocking the facebook photos stuff (on purpose), but I could easily be talked into it. Shoot me a message on the contact us page if you want to discuss further.

Aza Raskin had a pretty good proof of concept for dealing with this issue that shows only the “sharing” sites that you’ve actually visited.

SocialHistory.js