Share This
Those regular readers will recall that a few weeks ago I first said ping.fm in conjunction with a plug-in called pingpress.fm was a great way to push your content out to different social network and such as that. Shortly after that, I recanted, largely over the lack of controls and nice formating in the pingpress.fm. It was also problematic with picking up a ping and repeated it a second and third time. At the time I mentioned that I had a good replacement that was generally even better – Share This.
You sign up on the website and with the basic configuration you can be going in a short few minutes. Once you are signed up you can begin to use it by going to their website and posting in a URL. It gives you a pop-up of various social network and other systems that you can select to share the URL. As you share things to various networks you will save some information in the future it will come up somewhat automatically. Oh, and if you really want to be annoying you can share it out to contact lists from various email clients/sites and instant messenger contact lists.
If you spend a few minutes on the website you can select several additional sites to share things on beyond the normal offering of about twenty some sites. Beyond that, if I recall correctly it does have an interface so you could conceivably increase the number of sites you share too. Though I believe that requires some custom programming to actually make it fully work. I have not, I admit, explored this particular option as of yet.
The real power of the Share This set of tools comes from the plugins for various other sites and of course in particular the one that is available for WordPress. You may have noticed a little green button at the bottom of my posts that looks like three white nodes (dots) connected by lines. I can use that to share it to various social networks that I desire to have various pages shared out to.
What is really neat about this though and that makes up somewhat for it not being a completely automated process is this: If you like something, you can click on the button yourself and push it out to your friends and such on whatever social network you would like to do so.
