How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how popular sharing by email is. It's clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one however, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The big surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely popular ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively short time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal's blog, which is always a great place to discover new things about the web.

Why This is Important

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It's an important detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most popular can help make this decision. Here at RWW we don't use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn't offer sharing by Facebook at all - something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, however, include the following:

• Your site's audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren't a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb stories on MySpace - but maybe we're wrong!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren't for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Delicious users, for example, don't necessarily think of what they are doing as sharing (it's often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very popular ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.

Smub, which stands for "smart multi-use bookmarking," requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.

Todd Montgomery, Smub's Marketing and Business Development VP, spoke with us Sunday afternoon, saying, "I know particularly people who tweet do it frequently. Unless you're registered on Smub, it still requires you to log in to third-party services each time you share a link. This is something we're working on for the future."

Other long-term plans include allowing users to define and add other sharing/bookmarking sites outside of the initial nine.

Montgomery and the rest of the Smub team don't see the service as a stop-gap solution until smart phones get smarter, and they plan to add value across web and mobile interfaces. In addition to allowing users to export their content, he said, "We're also coming up with a list function. Instead of having to bookmark each link, you can create a list. Now, your friends will only have to go to one destination to see all the associated links," a function the Smub team thinks will be especially useful for academics and researchers.

Although their initial core focus is on the iPhone, Smub will be optimizing the user interface for Blackberries and other smart phones, as well.

Hello, which was part of Google's 2004 acquisition of Picasa, seems to have been neglected in recent years. According to Compete, Hello's traffic has fallen by over 50% year-over-year, and Wikipedia says that Hello shut down its "Bloggerbot IM" service in favor of Picasa's "Blog This" function in 2006.

The Hello team encourages users to use Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and Google Talk, and it seems likely that redundancy is what killed Hello. Google Talk already has file sharing and Picasa albums are viewable within the chat client (though Google Talk doesn't encrypt files and chats the way Hello did). Could we see tighter integration between Picasa and Google Talk now that Hello is out of the picture? And more importantly, what will Google do with such a cool domain?

Radar, at its core, is a photo sharing community that is not unlike Yahoo's Flickr, though Radar puts a stronger focus on the community aspects of the service than on the pictures themselves, which makes sense, given that most of the content on the site was taken with camera phones.

Because of this, Radar's web service and iPhone app emphasize communication between users. You can, of course, leave public comments on every picture, but you can also send private messages to other users.

Radar features a good set of privacy controls, which allow you to set your pictures to be private, or to make them visible to all of Radar's users and the rest of the Internet. Radar also provides you with a widget that lets you display your images on your own website.

It Just Works

What makes Radar's iPhone application special is that it provides you with an amazing amount of features (including some basic editing functions for your pictures), without overwhelming the interface. Every picture, for example, comes with statistics about how often it has been seen, liked, and commented on.

Using the application is a lot of fun because everything pretty much works the way you would expect it to. When you email pictures, for example, Radar's app nicely integrates with your iPhone contacts. Double-click on a picture and you get the full-screen version.

As you would expect from a mobile photo sharing application, you can easily upload your pictures to Radar's web service and see the latest updates from your friends.

One feature we do miss on Radar's site, however, is RSS feeds. While Radar can send out a message to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can't import a feed with your pictures to FriendFeed or other social media services. Radar, however, says that it is planning to integrate its service with more platforms in the near future.

Verdict

We got a chance to test Radar's iPhone app over the last few weeks and really enjoyed the experience. The Radar community is still small, but also very lively and encouraging. Radar, of course, is entering a very crowded market, but they may just have found the right niche to thrive in.

We wrote Brinker with these concerns, and his response was an interesting commentary on how folks use Twitter and how apps should adapt to those user habits and patterns. "Our experience is that Twitter is for fast, real-time consumption of content, not collaboration and file sharing in the editing mode," he wrote. "We find most of our users are focused on display-only content." And for display-only files, you could hardly find a simpler solution.

Here's how it works.

User A fills out this dead simple form:

Once the upload button's been clicked, the tweet is posted. That's it. TwitDoc gives User A the status ID for the tweet as well as a short URL for the file itself. Here's what the tweet will look like:

And here's what a text document looks like. PDFs fare well, too. TwitDoc uses Scribd for these files types, and Scribd allows the files to be emailed or embedded, for when retweeting just won't cut it.

The service is still fairly young, so kinks are being worked out constantly. For the time being, image files are a mixed bag. Everything gets sized to fit the screen width at the moment, so a small PNG was bloated and awful-looking, and a larger JPEG looked ok but was definitely smaller.

Also, the creators are working to expand the number of supported file types. Currently, in addition to image and text/Word files, TwitDoc supports PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

"Our primary focus is on sharing documents, but we also want to smartly handle all types of files as we grow," wrote Brinker. "Our plan is to identify the best handlers of various file types and route them the way we think users would want them handled.

"We also want the reader experience to be safe, fast, and easy," he continued. Especially considering the risk of virus transmission during file swaps, he wrote, "We do not think downloading files to users' machines is the right model for Twitter."

Brinker also wrote that TwitDoc has an open API and that his team is working with Twitter clients to provide support to those who don't use the Twitter web interface.

Monetizing a Button

The AddThis platform, which we also use here on RWW, should be a good fit for Clearspring, though it is not quite clear how Clearspring could monetize the service.

For users, AddThis is simply a convenient way to share and bookmark interesting sites. The problem with this, of course, is that a bookmarking button is extremely hard to monetize. Unlike some of its competitors like delicious or ma.gnolia, AddThis is not a destination site for most of its users, but simply a feature provided by the publisher.

Clearspring is clearly looking to expand its audience, but, as Josh Catone points out, it also gives Clearspring access to an enormous vault of data about sharing on the net, which it could use to build an advertising and marketing platform. Over time, it will be interesting to see how Clearspring plans to integrate these two products.

As we reported last week, Photobucket is highly dependent on MySpace for a large share of its traffic. Keeping this in mind, it makes perfect sense for Photobucket to try to reach out to a wider audience across the Internet by giving its users more and easier options to share their content.

Making Sharing Easier

While posting from Photobucket is now significantly easier, it should be noted that this is not a solution that auto-posts your images directly to a selection of different social sites. You still have to individually post your images to every site separately, so this is not a replacement for services like Tarpipe or Pixelpipe.

Mobile Traffic Up

In its announcement, Photobucket also points out that traffic to its mobile site tripled during 2008 and continues to grow. Given that Photobucket's users trend towards being younger than those of other photo sharing sites, this makes perfect sense, but it is also a good indicator that there is still a lot of growth left in the mobile photo sharing market..

Is This Enough to Gain Back Market Share?

Overall, these updates, which also include a new 'live slideshow' feature, look like they are putting Photobucket in the right direction. The company has lost a large amount of market share in the last few months and is under a lot of pressure from Yahoo's Flickr. These new features will allow it to become more visible outside of MySpace, though we will have to see if this is enough to make a difference in the long run.

Thanks to this update, Mac users (who use the latest beta version) can now also finally share their screens with PC users, which wasn't possible until now.

Overall, while it works perfectly well, Skype's screen sharing features are pretty basic and allow users to either share the full screen or select a part of the screen they want to share. A number of third-party developers already offered Skype plugins that allow users to share their screens with their contacts. And quite a few of these offer a wider range of features than Skype's own solution, including white-board functionality.

The image of the screen is great, as one would expect. But in order to share a screen, a voice call has to be initiated, which might not always be what you really want to do, especially if you are like a lot of us here at RWW who often use Skype for text-only chats as well. Sadly, it also doesn't look like it is possible to share a screen with a group of contacts or a Skype room. For now, you will still need dedicated screen sharing programs like Yuuguu for this kind of functionality.

More New Features

Skype also added additional support for visually impaired users who use screen reading software, as well as birthday reminders that will alert you when it's one of your contacts' birthdays.

As always, we need to point out that this is beta software and you might still find some bugs in it. Overall, though, Skype's beta releases have generally been very stable. A full set of release notes is available here (PDF).

Nokia plans to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices. As we explained back in January, Twango is similar to eSnips, Multiply and PeopleAggregator, in that it combines media sharing with social networking. Twango was founded by a group of 5 ex-Microsoft employees in fall 2004 and officially launched in October 2006.

Co-founder Jim Laurel told me back in January that Twango aims to be more than just a "destination experience". He said at the time that their long term play is to be a platform. Six months later, and being a part of Nokia's platform will certainly help ramp up the product's user base.

The following graph illustrates what Twango is all about:

Source: Twango

Mobile was key to Twango's plans back in January, and of course it will be even more so now. As far as the market goes for media sharing, Twango's Randy Kerr told me in January that they see it "still in its infancy" - he quoted a stat from Forbes.com that claims "only 7% of digital images captured in 2005 were uploaded to the web". He told me "the average user has yet to arrive" on media sharing sites and that currently it's just early adopters. Their target demographic is older and "perhaps more sophisticated" than the MySpace crowd - i.e. in the 24-39 age group.

Interestingly I met another company yesterday here in New Zealand that is going after the exact same market - and using media sharing as their main platform. More on them in a later post (they are going global).

Conclusion

I noted 6 months ago that Twango is an ambitious product and that the proof of the pudding will be whether Twango can attract users and get network effects going. It's fair to say that's no longer a problem for them, now that Nokia has acquired it!

Is this a sign of Zoto's immanent demise? Possibly, but in a world with lots of niche photo sharing sites, there may be no meta-lessons to learn here. At the very least, there's some very nice photo sharing software now available for use on your site.

In these "everything must be free" times, it's interesting that no one but the CEO has written about Zoto's latest move. It's move to a paid model was heavily criticized. Pete Cashmore, for example, wrote about it in a February 2007 post titled "How to Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto."

Open sourcing your software, asking for paid commercial use and offering users only paid accounts sounds like a reasonable business plan to me. Those steps alone are certainly not enough to kill a company. A lack of follow-through, marketing and community management could do that - and there are indications that Zoto is guilty of all three of those shortcomings. Maybe one of you brilliant cynics out there can do a better job with it on your own server.

Specifically, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf review some of the latest studies related to file sharing and music and bust some of the myths that the music industry is still pushing, including the idea that every download equals a lost sale. One study, for example, examined the iPod listening habits of 5,600 consumers and concluded that only 64% of the songs on these players had ever been played. It's unlikely that these users would have paid for the songs they never played.

The two researchers also argue that the fact that music was basically available for free increased a lot of consumer's willingness to buy MP3 players in the first place. According to another study, 65% of respondents said that they did no buy a CD because they had downloaded a free copy of a song, but at the same time 80% said that they bought a CD because they had sampled it.

In addition, the authors argue that mashups are likely to drive consumers to the original recordings and don't necessarily lead to lost sales either.

Number of Recordings has Doubled Since 2000

Oberholzer-Gee's and Strumpf's focus is not so much on whether or not the music industry is loosing money because of file sharing, but whether file sharing has deterred the production of music. While there are lots of arguments about the financial losses the music industry might or might not have incurred from file sharing, the production of music is clearly up (the number of recordings produced has doubled since 2000), and so is the demand for concert tickets (and the price of these tickets). As for films, even in countries where piracy is rampant (including South Korea, India, China), as well as in the U.S., the number of yearly film productions has only increased in the last couple of years.

This study, of course, comes as a crucial moment in the file sharing debate, as the Thomas vs. Capitol case is entering its final days (our report from earlier today). There, the music industry and the court are still working under the assumption that every copy is a lost sale.

If you have some spare time and an interest in this topic, you should definitely have a look at this paper. It's actually quite readable - especially for an academic paper by two economists - and short.

CC-licensed logo image used courtesy of Flickr user Rev Dan Catt.

Trend: Illegal File Sharing Sites Go Legit

The interesting trend, here, though, is that a lot of companies and services that were previously known for being 'illegal' hubs for file sharing are now trying to go legit. Napster, the grandfather for Kazaa and most of its brethren, is now a respectable paid service, and the Pirate Bay may offer a legal version of its service soon.

As Eric Pfanner pointed out in the New York Times, we are now getting to the point where using legal services like Spotify or Lala are actually so much more convenient than illegally downloading music. Given this trend, it makes sense for centralized services like Kazaa to slowly drift to a legal model. At the same time, decentralized file sharing options like BitTorrent, which don't depend on a single company to work, will still continue to be popular. Chances are, though, that users will probably share less music through torrents over the next year or so, as more cheap and free options allow users to legally access music more conveniently.

In March of this year, they launched an iTunes-esque music store. Now, according to the LA Times, LimeWire plans to add more social features to its service. Better late than never.

"Users will be able to create their own private file-sharing networks with friends and/or family members, with greater control over what gets shared with whom. In a recent interview, Kevin J. Bradshaw, Lime's chief operating officer, described it as the ability to create a 'personal publishing platform' that delivers photos to family members or homework assignments to students."

Clearly, the social features are less about being social and more about being anti-social. It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to realize that this new feature set also offers the ability for users to step out of the larger sharing community and form trusted sharing networks with other users.

The question is: will these smaller networks truly protect users who are sharing the types of copyrighted content that draws the ire of the RIAA? Or will the desire to get the latest and greatest music and videos continue to expose these smaller networks to the same problems that have plagued the larger community?

Other P2P services have tried a variety of ways to avoid litigation. So far, at least as far as the "-sters" go - Napster, Grokster, and Aimster - none has met with a great deal of success.

With current economic conditions causing even the most successful companies to reduce expenditures, can LimeWire continue to fend off the legal eagles and make a success of its service? We'll just have to wait and see.

Based in part on the language used by Google in confirming the deal, that they have "acquired certain assets and technology of Zingku" I'd guess that the service will likely be absorbed to provide new mobile functionality across a number of other Google Applications.

If a new layer of SMS alerts, polls and sharing features start appearing in Google Docs, Grand Central and elsewhere in the coming months - that will probably be the result of Zingku dissipation across the sprawling Google properties.

As we pointed out in our initial review of the service, Wuala uses the computers of other users to store a large part of the data on the service. Users who share a larger part of their hard drives are rewarded with more cloud storage.

Web Interface: Great for Photo Sharing

The new web interface turns Wuala into a capable file sharing service, though it has a few limitations. We really like the ability of Wuala to work as a great photo sharing site thanks to the new web interface. It is also great for sharing public documents and videos. However, you can't actually manage your shared files from the web interface.

Wuala also lets you share files privately over the web by providing you with a 'secret' URL to your files.

Wuala is operating in a crowded market, with other services like drop.io or Box.net offering a lot of the same functionality without having to use a desktop application. Currently, Wuala's users are storing almost 30 million files on the service and this web interface is surely going to increase the popularity of the service. Whether that is enough to lift it over some of its competitors remains to be seen, however, as some users will surely have some privacy concerns about the distributed storage solution.