As many folks (thanks all) have written in to tell me, yesterday Google launched a social bookmarking/sharing service that uses the Share Icon. This is excellent. The Share Icon has been showing up in all sorts of places – it is, as hoped, becoming the standard icon used to represent sharing on the web.
As for Google’s usage of the icon, they use it in two places:
- on the bookmarklet:
- 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. 🙂
This post is part of the project: Share Icon. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
This post is part of the project: Share Icon. View the project timeline for more context on this post.