"Social media buttons are not a social media strategy." Yes! Right? I generally agree with iA that social share buttons — that is, the ones served by Facebook, Twitter, etc. — are scourges of the Web. But since we're building a web app geared toward tablets and phones, we probably do need to help users share our stuff. So I figured we should start a branch to discuss how we should approach that...

Two things to come to mind - first, these buttons are used to track users by the larger networks and implementation can slow a page. Second, on mobile it's not as easy to send to Tumblr/FB/etc the same way you can on Desktop.

I think we need to provide some form of shortcut but explore options ther than the standard embedded buttons.

Some useful data suggesting that people do, in fact, click the tweet button: luigimontanez.com But it's worth noting that "tweet button" isn't just the standard one that's served by Twitter itself; it includes tweets generated with Twitter Web Intents: dev.twitter.com Facebook similarly offers "share" as an alternative to "like": developers.facebook.com

GOOD takes that approach, displaying various home-grown buttons after the user clicks on a generic share button along the lines of what Gideon's suggesting: good.is So does Upworthy, the site where the developer who ran that study works, though they are much more in-your-face about it: upworthy.com

I could be in favor of potentially ditching Facebook - it could be argued that's really not the target demo we're going after anyway. But I'd strongly disagree with the "if readers are too lazy...." argument as a cop out for weak functionality - readers are lazy, we should make it easy to do what they'd want to do if they weren't.

Considering how much emphasis we're putting on annotations, Twitter is an obvious must.

Second to that - Instapaper/ReadItLater should be a big focus, particularly given the data on how it gets used by tablet owners during the daytime hours (I can share if you havent seen).

I'd love to ditch G+ in favor of a more proprietary "plus up" of an annotation or something, to move it higher up the chain or importance. If not for launch then down the line.

I like the meaningless-but-fun "kudos" button on the Svbtle network blogs: dcurt.is I also like Michael's idea of a nebulous star that might, by default, save the item for offline viewing but could also be configured to mean "send to Instapaper," "post to Tumblr," "display on a recycling bin renewsolution.com in London," or whatever.

I tend to agree with Sarah on the reader laziness point. That said, a blog post from a former Guardian employee suggests that the traditional sharing buttons are effective, i.e. that the readers are not so lazy after all and do use the sharing buttons: bit.ly

The author of "Sweep The Sleeze" actually comments at the bottom of the blog post. Not surprisingly, he disagrees.

Reading these posts and our conversation, I wonder whether we could just runs some light A/B testing to see what really jives with our users. Alternatively, we should also think about what buttons to provide from the perspective of what we think the product should do. If seamless sharing across the biggest social networks is important, we need to provide it one way or another in my opinion.

I like the idea of providing a single button with an overlay with more options. A registered user may fine-tune the selection of what appears (removes FB, adds option for Instapaper, etc).

Given the emphasis on a non-US centric perspective we have yet to approach the fact that we would want to include other networks like China's Weibo. I don't relish reading through those API docs...

Coming out of today's conversation with A17, that's the direction we're moving ahead with (one share button that displays an overlay to select a method).

The Weibo API docs are in English, even if what the calls are returning aren't. :) open.weibo.com

The single button idea seems like the ideal approach. If your goal is to broadcast the stories, the share action should be quick, easy and available to everyone. As suggested, you might have two tiers:

- Unregistered: Share to your target audience's most popular platforms. (This might be useful for China: techinasia.com)

- Registered: Add self-selected options, including sending stories to a reader/read later service.

You might also want to think about SMS as a means for sharing content, especially in countries where texting is the preferred method of mobile information delivery.