We were so excited about announcing the new Automatic Log In feature this week, we neglected to mention the other upgrade we rolled out at the same time — Sharing.
You've probably noticed a new icon and the word "Share" at the upper right corner of many of our content pages:
It works via a cute and highly functional kind of pop-up layer (not a window) that allows you to send a link to our pages via email, or to post a link to dozens of social web services including the biggies like Twitter and Facebook.
Using it is pretty self-explanatory, but for the record...when you click on the "Share" icon, up pops a little "windoid" that looks like this:
Note the arrows and the little circles at the bottom of the white area. There are four screens of choices, including some you've never heard of..."Twackle"? Click the right arrow or one of the circles and check 'em out. Who knew there were so many?
Say you click Email. Now you see this:
Fill in the form and click Send:
Pretty easy, huh? You've just sent a link to the page you were looking at when you clicked the Share button. To close the window, just click the big [X] in the upper right corner of the windoid:
Want to Tweet about something on our site on Twitter? We appreciate that, and it's easy — just click Twitter on first screen, fill in this form and click Post:
Posting to Facebook is different. When you click the Facebook icon in the ShareThis windoid, it takes you to the Facebook web site. If you are already logged in, you'll be able to post the item to your profile feed with one click:
The other services have slightly different procedures, but it's all pretty obvious if you just try it.
Go forth and Share, spacefans.
And let us know how it works. We can tweak it if we get your feedback.
:: SH
Works great :) Thanks!!!
Posted by: Kevin Schultz | 08 November 2009 at 04:13 PM
When I saw this feature on the website I was very excited. I have used it a couple of times, myself. Great work Kevin and team!
Along the same lines, if you are taking ideas from paying customers (which I am one) I'd like to see what I listen to scrobbled to Last.fm (and Pandora for those fans). Trust me, being in the IT profession, I know that's a very tall order. But if you have the resources to do over time, I think the integration could be phenomenal. Honestly, in the short amount of time that I've been writing this comment, I can't say that I see an advantage for you doing this other than customer satisfaction. I'm hoping however, there's some sort of strategic benefit that can derived from this integration. :-)
Again, thanks for enabling the Share feature and Happy New Year!
Posted by: Ra Osolage | 08 January 2010 at 10:14 AM