The new site really does a great job highlighting the icon as a resource for everyone to use (including the original Open Source licenses), and the download includes source files in vector format.

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I’ve watched this go through a few different revisions and provided my input along the way. I think the guidelines are excellent¹, they keep the icon free for everyone while helping define how it should be used, so that its meaning is well preserved.

If you’d like to comment or send feedback to the ShareThis team on the guidelines the best way to do so is in the Google Group. Kudos to the team for doing this the right way.

1. Thanks to Mozilla for paving the way on this. [back]

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As for Google’s usage of the icon, they use it in two places:

1. on the bookmarklet:

   

2. in the sharing pop-up window:

   

The usage on the bookmarklet is just right. From this icon you can post to Google shared stuff, to a variety of other sites, and send via e-mail. Click the icon to share the page, and then choose what mechanism you want to use to share it (e-mail, social web sites, etc.).

The usage of the icon in the pop-up window is a little bit incorrect in my view. The icon appears on the tab that posts the item to Google, which is not where you can send the item to other services. I think it would make more sense to have a Google icon on that tab, because you are posting to your Google shared stuff page from that tab:

It’s important that the Share Icon represent the ability to sharing to a variety of sites and channels, not represent sharing to any one specific web site, channel or service.

Speaking of sharing, I’ve been getting a lot of requests for a version of Share This that people can use on other platforms and on normal HTML web sites. I’m very pleased to announce that this is all in the works, and will be available in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

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Thord asked some good questions, I hope my responses are interesting.

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• New method of including Prototype for WP 2.0.x users (can be used by other plugins as well) to avoid including Prototype twice, if possible. This technique is also used in my new WP Grins release.
• StumbleUpon is included as a default link.
• Updated FAQ in the README, addressing a few issues I’ve seen in the forums and via e-mail.
• Added a robots="noindex, noarchive" to the Share This page for each post.
• Added a missing > symbol.
• Now using wp_mail() instead of the straight PHP mail() function.
• Explicitly set the z-index for the pop-up form.

I haven’t gotten around to some of the more significant changes I plan to make, but I figured getting these out there sooner rather than later was a good idea.

Also, I’ve seen a number of translations popping up, if someone wanted to head up an effort to get proper translation files included, I’d be happy to include them. All the strings are abstracted already.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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• Moveable Type (and TypePad)
• Drupal
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Firefox Extension
• Safari Extension
• Greasemonkey scripts for inclusion in web-based apps like Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.
• Add more in the comments…

I haven’t built add-ons for most of these platforms before, so I’d love to work with folks who do have experience on these platforms port it over. I set up a Share This/Share Icon developers forum to help get things started.

If you want to port Share This to another platform leave a comment, head over to the forum or get in touch and we’ll get it built.

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On Dec 12th, there weren’t any pages that showed up on a search for “powered by share this”¹, now there are nearly 200,000240,000.

That’s a pretty good initial adoption of Share This. I think it might be time for step 2.

1. Which only appears in version 1.3 and greater. [back]

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1. Support for a Share This link in feeds via a custom page that presents the Share This information along with the post content. This also works for mobile visitors and visitors that have JavaScript disabled in their browser.
2. The addition of the Share Icon to the link - on by default.

Here is a screenshot of the Share This custom page:

This screenshot has some of my own custom styling that I applied through the ‘akst_head’ hook (which I added to allow you to customize/override the CSS of the Share This page via plugin).

The icon is, of course, the icon from the Share Icon project (which I launched the web site for yesterday).

I’d also like to thank the folks that sent in a donation after my little plea when I released my Articles plugin. When I receive a few donations like this, it makes it much easier to spend the time necessary to package up these plugins and make them freely available. Any little amount is appreciated - perhaps I should try resurrecting the $1 donation for each download concept again. I still think that’s an idea that could work. If even a fraction of folks who download would do it, it would work out well for everyone.

The download is available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and send me the link.

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I’ve released the icon concept under four licenses (quad-licensed):

• GPL
• LGPL
• BSD
• Creative Commons Attribution 2.5

Right now I’ve got my initial icon concept up there since that is the one that got the most support here. This isn’t to say that this design is the final decision, I’ll be quite happy if additional concepts are submitted for consideration. I’ve set up a Flickr stream on the Share Icon web site and images tagged with ’share-icon’ in Flickr will show up as concepts there.

And last but certainly not least, a big tip of the cap to Luke Wojewoda for the 16×16 pixel version, Matt Brett and his feed icons project and Chris Pirillo and his OPML icons project.

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Here they are in context with the Feed and OPML icons:

Concept #1

Concept #2

Concept #2a

Comments are open.

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I’ve come up with a rough concept icon:

It’s in the same vein as the feed icon as Chris discussed.

The connected dots represent information/data/ideas passing from one originating place to others. The green color is used to reinforce the “go”ing nature of the interaction.

It’s obviously rough, and just a first concept so hopefully we can discuss it as a concept rather than picking at the problems in the details¹.

The comments are open.

UPDATE: Here is a version that will shrink to a small icon size better:

Please continue to post your own contributions (links to images, etc.) in the comments - but remember to test them at 12×12 pixels and 16×16 pixels as well. Use the feed icons package as an example.

UPDATE: Concept #2 posted.

1. The connected circles on the interior probably need to be a bit larger/bolder to work at a small size, etc. [back]

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Does the “Share This” link need a standard icon to be more recognizable? And is there a generic “social bookmark” icon that has gained any sort of traction we could use? I don’t think I’ve seen one - so it can’t be that widely adopted yet if there is one.

Create your own “Share This” icon and post a link to it in the comments - the best one will get included in the next release. Please make sure to include a 16×16 version and 14×14 version in a pixel preserved format (gif, png) and release it under the GPL to be considered.

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