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Social media has taken over the web (for now) and the name of the game is sharing, something legislation like SOPA and PIPA just didn’t seem to understand. Rather than figuring out a new economic model based on the reality of sharing on the web, that rewards this type of activity (which is essentially just a more trackable form of “word-of-mouth” advertising, the best kind of promotion for any product, service or brand), instead these legislative measures simply try to take us back to the stone-age by applying a “copyright theft” label to anything as mundane and innocent as posting a link to potentially copyrighted materials. Well, whether bureaucrats and greedy corporate execs approve of the idea or not, the culture of sharing that the internet has bred is definitely here to stay!

In these days of non-stop distractions and the constant bombardment of messages towards the average internet user, you (i.e. your website, or your brand) absolutely have to have a presence at least somewhere in the endless streams of information available via the leading social media sources. That’s not just the typical “Social Media marketer” hype but a sadly true statement. Believe me, I really wish it weren’t true, but just look at these figures and the infographic to the right showing time spent logged in to the major Social Networks and Social Media sites:

Here is where I should admit that I could have just started off this post with saying “use a third party sharing service” and been done with it. Let me clearly state now that yes, I do realize there are many services out there that can provide you this kind of utility out-of-the-box, within a few clicks and simply agreeing to their terms then completing the sign up. The two that come to mind are ShareThis and AddThis (both of which I have no personal interest or stake in, aside from having been a user of each in the past, on different sites).

However, with any third party service, you are effectively giving them access to your data, and depending on the amount of code involved in running their solutions, may also be opening up potential security risks by including third-party JavaScript. Last but not least, and most significantly, as with any third party service, you never want to rely on them too much. I’ve learned this the hard way, especially of late with Google’s increasingly frequent acquisitions of promising startups, which turn out to be buy-to-fry (as in buy to remove a competitor’s product from the market completely), or buy to discard (otherwise leave to collect dust or stop adding new features but keep a service running, in order to prevent any future direct competition). Two that come to mind are Aardvark (a community-powered Question & Answer service) and Apture (a community blogging and website enhancement tool), the former of which is still alive thus falls into the “collect dust” pattern, and the latter of which was discontinued to be integrated into the Google behemoth or lost to the annals of internet history forever.

Also, expect a similar post to this one discussing how to build a simple Apture alternative next month!
Sharing Tools and Badges are organized by content type below:
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