

Dear Internet: please move the share buttons from the web page to the browser - jacobn

There's been more than one mock-the-silliness-that-is-ten-share-buttons-for-an-unshared-blog-post blog posts.<p>The mobile browsers have already shown the way - a single share button, share with any service (yes, there needs to be some open bring-your-own-service functionality like we already do for search).<p>I'm hoping one or two people who are working on one of the major browsers would read this and "simply put it in" and we'd eventually all be living with a cleaner, faster loading web as the on-page buttons go the way of the dodo.<p>Not to mention that it would actually be really useful. 
======
codeka
The problem is, _they work_ (for a certain definition of "work"). 

On one website that I work on, implementing one of those stupid "like us on
Facebook" popups (in the lower right of the screen) almost doubled the number
of likes the page had over a couple of weeks. 

Now, whether the number of Facebook likes your page has is a useful metric to
you is another matter, which is why I put the word "work" in quotes above...

~~~
89a
Is it any surprise that the sort of people who are still actually using
Facebook would be the sort of people who would click on something as
ridiculous as that

~~~
betterth
"Still using Facebook"

It's like you're actively denying the fact that it is, TODAY, the largest and
most used social network in history. 

Would you at least let it BEGIN it's user decline before you call it dead? 

Let me guess: You ran to G+ on Day 1 (because one large advertising company is
worse than another large advertising + email + search company...)

~~~
andyhmltn
Mark my words, within the next 3 years facebook will begin to decline.  90% of
the people I speak to say they don't use facebook anymore because it's got
boring. 

~~~
zaidf
If your sample of people that you surveyed was representative of facebook
users on the whole, then you wouldn't need 3 years to see the decline of
facebook .  It should have been happening right now because as you said, 90% of
the people _you've_ surveyed no longer use it. 

It's fair to say that your sample group is totally flawed. 

~~~
TsiCClawOfLight
Well, I've heard of many people saying (and I still go to school, so my survey
is kind of relevant) that they 1.  have multiple accounts, like for games or 2. 
are bored by facebook/ annoyed by the stream of useless stuff, or even 3. 
simply hardly ever go online (as in, measured in weeks, or months)

~~~
zaidf
Once again, the anecdotal evidence does not conform with the usage numbers
released every so often that show facebook users spending massive amounts of
time(average of 400 minutes per month per user). 

A lot of people may whine that they are "bored" but that doesn't mean they
don't use the site.  That is the problem with going on anecdotes--they often
represent what people say instead of actually do. 

~~~
betterth
Exactly.  Bored people go to Facebook.com.  Bored?  Type Facebook.com.  That's
what people do.  And considering the influx of "content" pages, like George
Takei's, which provide continuous content updates all day long, I can see why
people check back frequently when they're bored. 

Subscribe to 5-10 "content" feeds and your wall will always have another joke
or post to read...

Many people do this, I imagine. 

------
fredsanford
Can we just remove all the share crap that allows these so-called "social
media services" AKA amoral data collectors to collect data on any and everyone
who happens to load a page? 

Call me a luddite, but... I got along for 30+ years without Facebook, Myspace,
Twitter et al.  We had gopher and we liked it! 

What we didn't have (or didn't notice) was a bunch of AOL style butt-heads
shoving useless advertising at us. 

For what it's worth, I try to filter them out but keeping up with the
filtering is getting tiresome. 

~~~
zaidf
_We had gopher and we liked it!_ 

I take it that you are speaking for your generation, yes?  If so, I think much
of my generation would _not_ like gopher and _does_ like facebook etc. 

Re: advertising - you hate on data collection and at the same time call out
"useless advertising."  A core goal of data collection is to make advertising
more relavant and with things like retargeting, I think things have improved
for the better. 

~~~
JasonFruit
What targeted advertising means, apparently, is that if you look up Warby
Parker once to see what they do, you'll get nothing but Warby Parker ads for
the next month.  I'm getting so sick of empty eyeglasses staring at me, you
can't even begin to imagine.  If that's targeted advertising, you couldn't hit
the broad side of a barn with it. 

~~~
fredsanford
Amen.  I don't think more than 10% of the targeted advertising I was exposed to
ever appealed to me. 

Buy some jeans on Amazon for a gift, get ads for all kinds of crappy jeans
from Amazon.  I like and wear one type of Levi's jeans.  Not one Levi's ad ever
hit me. 

Buy some Little Mermaid crap for my niece, see above. 

Buy Alabama Shakes debut album on ITunes, get all kinds of ads for music I
wouldn't listen to in a dentists chair. 

------
abcd_f
Not going to work. 

A website operators won't take a gamble that a visitor may or may not have a
sharing widget built into his browser, so it's a safer bet for them to keep
the sharing buttons on the page. 

~~~
manojlds
Thats the point I suppose.  Make it as prevalent as possible. 

------
esolyt
"(yes, there needs to be some open bring-your-own-service functionality like
we already do for search)"

There is, actually.  At least on my mobile operating system. 

~~~
hahainternet
Yup.  Android Intents provide this system perfectly.  Any app can hook into the
intent, provide you a list, and you can select action defaults. 

~~~
icebraining
Hopefully Web Intents[1] will bring the same to every browser. 

[1]: <http://webintents.org/>

~~~
groby_b
Hopefully, yes.  Go download the latest Chrome Canary to play with the current
implementation - it's already pretty cool. 

------
Tomek_
Use Ghostery (<http://www.ghostery.com/>) or Do Not Track
(<http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php>), or various others addons like these,
and you will have the problem partially solved. 

------
Skalman
There _was_ an effort to put sharing into Firefox.  I'm not sure of the current
status - it looks like it may have gone stale. 

See <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/F1> and <http://f1.mozillamessaging.com/>

~~~
jamessimm
I tried that out for a while when it was first announced, but it didn't seem
to work as well as, say, Android's Intents.  And as you say, appears to have
gone stale. 

I suppose this is the scenario that Web Intents (<http://webintents.org/>) are
intended to deal with. 

EDIT: specifically <http://webintents.org/share>

~~~
Skalman
...and there actually seems to be _something_ going on with regards to sharing
in Firefox still.  According to [1] it's targeted at Firefox 17, though I
haven't noticed anything yet (I'm on Firefox Aurora 17 now).  It seems like it
has a much broader scope than just sharing. 

[1] <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Social_Integration>

~~~
bergie
Sharing something easily is one thing, but they seem to be planning to provide
a newsfeed/wall with this.  That'd be a big distraction that I hope they keep
away...

~~~
Skalman
For people spending their days on Facebook it might be an improvement.  It does
sound like a huge addon though and I agree that it'd probably be best to make
most of that non-default. 

~~~
bergie
The problem is, how keenly will the various services let something like
Firefox take their newsfeed?  This is exactly what Twitter for example is
trying to prohibit with their ToS. Just sharing is a lot more durable. 

------
theone
It would be great if the sharing functionality is built in browser, but the
control on what sharing services to show remains with developers.  This could
be achieved with some meta tags, or something.  But it'll make sense if the
developer can choose which all sharing platform link should be shown while
sharing. 

I said so, because there are a different kind of audience for different
websites, so generic sharing options wouldn't be a good idea. 

------
nicholassmith
Well, latest version of Safari has gone along this road which is nice but
completely limited, but I've found that I prefer being able to use
bookmarklets from the Bookmark Bar to have sharing, but then that's dependent
on the user having X installed for Y and there's no clean way to check.  Plus
you'd need the ability to rapidly update for multiple services, deal with
sharing changes and so on, so it's a sticky issue. 

------
darklajid
One way or another people will opt out. 

Betting on the integrated browser's support for sharing might be better than
plastering ugly overlays over interesting content.  Most 'this makes the site
unreadable' stuff these days are 'Share on ..' widgets. 

Today, most people around me (somehow inspired by my rants) block this stuff,
unconditionally.  Because it is 99% crap and the 1% where you want to share
something there's the old way of copying the url to your social platform of
choice. 

So - I'd put it different: Dear Internet, please restrain yourself in the use
of obnoxious "share" widgets and thingies or people will treat them just like
ads.  By ignoring or filtering them. 

~~~
sgdesign
You have to realize that "most people around you" are probably not
representative of internet users at large.  With the current state of things,
browsers would probably need to have implemented these features for a couple
years before most people get used to using them for sharing. 

~~~
darklajid
You're perfectly right - and I do realize that. 

On the other hand: I'm part of the group of people that installs/defines other
setups (for friends, family - people that don't bother).  All of those will
never see these 'share' buttons, because _I_ decide they are overused and
often harmful. 

I guess at one point AdBlock was used by a minority as well, but now it its
userbase is huge.  I predict (and of course I might be very wrong about this, I
don't claim to know the future here) that with the current (over-)usage of
'share' thingies we'll see the same scenario.  It starts off as reasonable
(simple ads), becomes annoying/slows down the reading experience/hides content
(sounds familiar?)  and will be despised by more and more users until even
people outside of my (and similar minded people's) influence find a solution
on LifeHacker on how to avoid these things. 

And frankly, that 'people getting used to them' argument seems weak.  There are
gazillion different (and most ugly, from this particular pov) ways to present
a 'share' sidebar or somesuch thing.  It's hardly what I'd call a unified and
well-defined experience. 

~~~
icebraining
_I guess at one point AdBlock was used by a minority as well, but now it its
userbase is huge._ 

But still a minority.  Adblock for Chrome has ~10M users, Chrome itself has
more than 310 million.  That's just a little over 3%. 

EDIT: apparently, ADP has 5M more, which means the total is still less than
5%. 

~~~
darklajid
Plus the users of my browser of choice

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-
plus/...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-
plus/statistics/?last=30)

Certainly no majority overall, but a huge number of people that never look at
ads, because .. ads sucked too much. 

------
wiradikusuma
So who gets to decide which buttons should be in browsers by default?  Sure,
Facebook, Google+, Twitter are obvious.  How about Pinterest?  Or X, Y and Z
which might be not popular in US but popular elsewhere? 

~~~
CharlieA
Possibly there could be a meta tag describing which share buttons should be
shown on the page--even what the particular share link should be when they're
clicked. 

~~~
bergie
A bit like Apple did with their "app banners": [http://david-
smith.org/blog/2012/09/20/implementing-smart-ap...](http://david-
smith.org/blog/2012/09/20/implementing-smart-app-banners/)

------
jrajav
<http://webintents.org/share>

------
dasil003
Flock tried it, a bunch of different ways.  People just weren't all that into
it. 

~~~
stigi
True!  I did like it back in the days.  What's the state of Flock right now?  The
website claims it's not dead yet ;)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Flock's big problem was, of course, that you had to convince people to install
a whole new browser. 

If they could redesign it as a browser plugin, it might have a shot. 

------
NZ_Matt
Windows 8 tries to solve this problem with sharing built into the OS, similar
to how intents work in Android. 

------
dansimau
Your dream is never going to become a reality in the way you're asking. 

As a feature of the desktop browser, users could turn share buttons off. 
Embedded in the page, they can't.  That is why the site operator put them there
in the first place: to maximise exposure. 

~~~
ville
Like someone already said, embedded buttons can be turned off with AdBlock. 
Normal users won't do that, but they won't tweak their browser settings
either. 

------
user24
They can already live in the browser by way of addons - if you use delicious
then install the addon.  If you don't, don't. 

The solution is not for browser makers to host the share buttons, but for
content creators to stop treating users like push-button monkeys and realise
that if I want to share it on facebook I'll do that of my own volition and if
I don't then a little blue and white f in a box at a cute angle is not going
to sway me one iota. 

Web page creators: It is not your job to make sharing easier. 

~~~
sirclueless
> Web page creators: It is not your job to make sharing easier. 

Actually, it pretty much is.  That is one of the key ways in which sites gain
audience, and it's a huge topic of concern among website creators, owners, and
programmers. 

Shares drive traffic, and both the website owner and the social network want
you to ask yourself on each shareable page, "Is this something worth sharing?" 
Some people will say yes and that's a win for everyone. 

You can say the on-site button doesn't do anything, but it really does.  It
sends a signal: Other people think this content is worth sharing, you might
think so too. 

There are other models for sharing content, for example a site only needs a
few self-interested posters on HN or Reddit to get traction there, then the
voting system and "front page effect" take over.  But for a decentralized
social site like Facebook, you need a good number of seed posters to decide,
"It might be in my self-interest to share this."  That only happens with
prompting. 

------
hendrik-xdest
I can already hear our customers ordering page enhancements that show an arrow
or a bubble pointing somewhat in the direction of where that FB button should
be in the current visitors browser. 

We know that problem with the "Add page to your home screen" button.  Of
course, it has to disappear when the user opens your website from home screen. 
And god forbid Apple changes anything - like releasing an 8" tablet. 

If we'd always get what we wish for, live could be so easy.  And boring,
probably. 

------
denzil_correa
I think we would soon have sharing in-built within the OS.  Mountain Lion
already has it while it would not take much time for Windows 8 to implement
this into their OS as well (if they already do not).  The lines between a
tablet/phone OS and a desktop/laptop OS are blurring and we can very well see
that with Mountain Lion and Windows 8.  Therefore, not just the browsers but
every bit of functionality in the OS which needs a "Share" will have it by
default. 

~~~
jrajav
This would be great as long as it's an open, agnostic API and not just
something cooked into the OS vendor's bundled apps. 

~~~
denzil_correa
Good point.  I think we are moving in that direction.  The reason being the OS
vendor does not own most of the "Share" ecosystem. 

------
erikpukinskis
The trouble is that the Long Tail of Social Services is there _for a reason_. 
Yea, maybe you are happy having your users share on Facebook and Twitter, but
Jane's Buck Hunter Haven wants to have a RateVenison share link on her blog
posts. 

Closer to home, how many posts on Hacker News have an actual "share on Hacker
News" link on them.  Quite a few.  How are you going to know which buttons go on
which sites? 

------
AhtiK
Just combine two browser extensions in Chrome:

1\. Adblock Plus [1] to remove in-site social widgets [2] and ads. 

2\. A social extension, pick your favorite, there are too many. 

[1] <https://adblockplus.org/en/>

[2] <https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Antisocial.txt>

~~~
krenel
In Firefox you can use the plugin Share Me Not that prevents third-party
buttons embebbed by sites from tracking you until you actually click on them. 

This plugin don't remove the social buttons from the page, just disables them. 

Thanks for the Antisocial AdBlock list btw! 

------
chrismorgan
... so that I can disable them (easily). 

------
aorshan
Rockmelt actually does this.  It's a browser built on top of Google Chrome. 
Along with a bunch of other features, it has one button in the top right where
you can take any page you're on and post it to Twitter, as a Facebook status,
or on a friend's Facebook wall. 

------
anonymouz
I agree with the idea, but please don't put them into the browser but in a
"social media" extension.  I have never clicked on one of these buttons (in
fact, I block them), so cluttering the default interface of my browser with
them would be very annoying. 

------
kinlan
Chrome canary and Dev channel have a built in Share button that fires a Share
webintent

------
sprobertson
What I'd like is an extension that just removes them entirely (an anti-social
browser?) 

For one, I don't use them.  For two, they cause a cluttered mess.  For three, I
don't want all those little snippets tracking my page loads. 

~~~
jacquesm
Ghostery. 

~~~
sprobertson
This is exactly that, and more.  Thanks. 

------
fudged71
We have them on Android and iOS (probably Windows Phone as well).  OSX 10.8 now
has tweet and facebook functionality as well.  Are the other operating systems
and browsers social enough?  Should they be? 

------
skimmas
Dear internet please remove share button from the web.  From EVERYWHERE. :) 

------
tomus
What about sharing option in Android, and now in Windows 8?  It seems to be
more versatile to embed this functionality into OS rather than a browser. 
We're getting there in my opinion ;)

------
pierrend
As a user I would love to agree but I can't.  On a https website Chrome blocks
additional JavaScript.  Thus I don't see another way than having share button
on the web page.  Am I wrong? 

------
zerostar07
A good start would be to have the user's identity to be managed by the browser
(with something like browserID).  The rest could just be extensions, for those
who care. 

------
chanux
I thought adblock can do this until things get better.  Apparently I'm correct
<http://superuser.com/a/454634>

------
Achshar
I am surprised no one mentioned web intents.  It is happening and it is
happening quickly.  Launch chrome canary to see some UX (although not
completely working yet)

------
html5web
I have installed Tweet extension in the morning.  Chrome canary version
installed share button on the right side of navigation bar, it's very useful
feature! 

------
jpswade
Share buttons are part of the the content, not the chrome. 

------
axian
It's already built into modern operating systems. ( OSX, iOS, Android)

Your request should really be "Please get rid of share buttons from websites"

------
joshka
Just like "Would you like fries with that?"  this is just: "would you like to
advertise my page for me?".  It'll only get worse before it gets better. 

------
hugoroy
These buttons are sources of data for Facebook, Twitter etc.  That's how they
track their user over the Web.  So no incentive for them to remove them

~~~
panacea
Yeah, not sure what the point of this post is.  I've got a share button in my
desktop, tablet and phone browsers (not that I neccessarily want them).  These
are for tracking and branding.  Facebook, Twitter et.  Al have not only
implanted tracking widgets on nearly every site, they've also got little
banner ads.  For free! 

~~~
hugoroy
Huh?  The share button in your desktop or your phone is not making requests to
Facebook or Twitter, thus it's not tracking you.  For instance, when you
integrate twitter's buttons on your website, you must opt-in the "do not
track" which means that otherwise, anyone visiting the website will be tracked
by twitter and the data is kept for some days.  Unless of course if that person
has an extension like disconnect.me

------
kintamanimatt
This would essentially lock out new "social media" sites as the effort of
manually installing a share button is going to be too much effort. 

------
gte910h
Why don't browser operators just suck it out of the page? 

It's not like the page can display something the browser doesn't want it to. 

------
marckremers
Working on a portfolio site now and managed to convince the clients not to
have any share buttons.  It looks so much better. 

------
patrickaljord
Latest chrome comes with a share button that works with webintents. 

------
brennenHN
Try RockMelt

------
drivebyacct2
Why has no one mentioned that this already exists. 

Web Intents, borrowing in fact from Androids ability to share from anywhere to
anywhere. ( and it is actually rather Android unique)

