Caterpillar Cowboy

innonate:

heyitsnoah:

Three reasons I think this chart is dumb:

1. We don’t know the sample size in comparison to the total audiences the sites that use AddToAny recieve. It could be that .01 percent of the total audience shared anything with AddToAny.
2. People share email by passing links IN AN EMAIL. This captures none of that.
3. I would guess the behavior for Twitter is similar, also not captured.

Before we worry about where people are sharing things, the number I would be most intererested in is what percentage of people share using a tool like AddToAny or ShareThis, I’ve always assumed it’s tiny. Anyone have any data from their own sites?

Via mikehudack:tedr:mikehudack:soupsoup:innonate

So are you saying you wouldn’t design unique UIs for FB, Twitter, and Email? You can’t do it for everything, but you certainly shouldn’t rely on AddToAny or ShareThis to do the work for you.

Again, the point of the graph — from a design perspective — is that certain sharing mechanism deserve their own, well thought-out UIs. Others — like Orkut or Bebo — don’t, which is why you have ShareThis/AddThis/AddToAny/Gigya/etc.

I think Noah’s point is that the graph could be misleading, since you don’t know the sample size or the context. What you should do is look at your logs / Google Analytics and see if your inbound traffic is coming from Twitter or Facebook or whatnot. Every site is going to be different because the content and focus will be different.

Also as Noah points out, I’m curious how many people under the age of 40 have trouble copying and pasting a link into email / twitter / where ever. Do you really need a widget taking up precious screen real estate to help them do that?