“Sharing” has to be one of the biggest buzz words of the internet over the last few years. With the introduction of services like email, instant messaging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and now Google Buzz, people have been provided with the tools for staying in contact with friends and family continuously. These services are used mostly for staying in touch, catching up on recent personal events and chatting but they have also introduced one of the most used functions of our day, sharing. People share photos, videos, links to web sites, links to music, favorite articles… the list goes on forever. “Sharing is the center of the social web.”1
In the beginning, digital sharing was done via email. Attachments were sent and frustrations elevated when emails were not received or “kicked back” because the attachments were too large. Sharing methods have evolved and changed over time and we are now inundated with hundreds of ways to share information with one another. Facebook and Twitter are by far the most popular, but many others have great feature sets and large followings. Only one service pulls them all together seamlessly, ShareThis. That little green button (the trademark of ShareThis) has made it’s way onto 130,000+ sites and reaches over 400 million users per month.
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For the three people out there who don’t use GMail, this might not be for you, but then again details of the new GMail layout might be enough to convince you that AOL, earthlink or hotmail accounts are really a thing of the past.
