Jeremy Zawodny is sick of, "sharing." By "sharing," Zawodny is referring to the questionably helpful "Share This" type links sites provide in an effort to get you to email content to your friends:

"Why is it that almost nobody can think of a way to represent "email this to a friend" without using the word "share"? I seem to run into "share" links all over the freaking place. Sometimes the single word "share" is the link. That?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s' really descriptive, guys. Good design.

And they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I'm too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it (see above list). Thanks for the confidence boost."

He makes a good point. The terminology used to represent this common task is all over the map, and so is the functionality of that link, from launching email applications to taking people to online forms. Personally, I'm a copy/paste the URL kind of guy for the reason Zawodny explains at the end of his post:

"Before you accuse me of over-estimating how "easy" it is to copy and paste, consider this: None of those email forms have any knowledge of my address book anyway. So I've gotta either remember and correctly type a bunch of my friends' email addresses in order to use them--or I have to, you guessed it, copy and paste them from my address book. Back to square one, huh?"

Exactly. My contact's email addresses are in my email application, so it's easier for me to copy the URL of the page I want to share into a new email, then address it to whomever I want to sent it to. That's much easier than remembering email addresses, typing them correctly, and figuring out how I'm supposed to delimit email address entries from one form to the next (does this one require commas or semi-colons?).

Here is a quick look at the "Share This" choices made by a few popular sites:


One way to make the forms more useful would be to integrate them with popular email applications. Google could integrate Gmail with YouTube, making your address book available for sharing.

We've thought about this for Technology Evangelist and current take two approaches.

1. Provide email friendly URLs that are under 80 characters long for easy copy/paste emailing. We've found that URLs longer than that tend to break when they wrap, causing disappointment for recipients of shared links.

2. Provide an "Email This Post" link at the bottom of each post. It clearly states what it does, opens a window to fill in sender information, and for those who want to be power users, integration with popular email applications including Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Plaxo can be done.

Unfortunately for Zawodny, I think we're going to see a lot more "Share This" links on the web moving forward due to the move away from easily emailable HTML pages to AJAXified browsing states that have to be converted into an email friendly link for sharing.