Do you want to share everything with everyone or is the idea of sharing your every move just a bit freaky to you too?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

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.

Currently the add-on only supports those three services. Mozilla says it picked those because of their popularity, their API support and their use of OAUth. Other services, such as Yahoo's email, required a CAPTCHA authentication prior to sharing, something that defeated the purpose of a single-click share button.

There are other options, such as AddThis, that already work to tidy up the mess of share buttons. But in announcing the new feature today, Mozilla says that "the system should know which sharing service you use, and offer to use those." While that's something that'll require further standardization of sharing protocols, arguably no one knows our Web sharing habits better than our browsers.

The code for F1 is open source, and you're free to fork it or request changes.

Mozilla Labs F1

That approach differs from many of the other photo-sharing apps on the market in two key ways. First, ZangZing makes it easy to pull together photos from multiple sources, uploaded by multiple people into one single album. Second, ZangZing emphasizes privacy. Using a photo service, in other words, needn't be a trade-off between privacy and group sharing.

When you create a ZangZing album, you can invite people to view but also to be contributors. Contributors can add photos via email or from their hard-drive via an uploader. Photos can also be imported from Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, Picasa Web, Shutterfly, and SmugMug. This helps users consolidate their photos into one location, pulled in from multiple, scattered sources.

Each album has its own privacy and sharing settings. You can opt to make an album widely available, sharing via Facebook or Twitter, or you can add password protection so that only certain people have access.

This sort of granular control, along with the ability to consolidate photos in one location, do give ZangZing a lot of appeal. The site also features a simple and well-designed layout that features the photo-browsing experience.

But that web-based browsing experience may not dovetail with how more and more people are snapping and sharing photos: we're doing this via our mobile phones, not via the Web.

Nonetheless, the desire for a safe place to share and store photos online persists, and ZangZing thinks it's nailed both the privacy controls and the importance of having one single album to hold memories.

The research is being undertaken by the Cybernorms group at Sweden's Lund University. The sociologists are interested in how the Internet shapes norms - both social and legal - and this study looks more closely on how those norms play out vis-a-vis file-sharing. "With your help," reads the survey's introduction, "we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the Internet."

The Cybernorms group made headlines with its research several years ago that analyzed users' behavioral changes when file-sharing became illegal. That research found that there were no social norms that inhibited people from file-sharing.

Moreover, it also found that making file-sharing illegal would do little to stop the practice: "There are strong indications that neither the law in itself nor new legal attempts at enforcing copyright will change the social norm on illegal file sharing. To the opposite, there is a documented willingness of paying for anonymity, keeping the internet flow of content, rather than return to a system of payment for each product."

As one of the most popular BitTorrent sites in the world, The Pirate Bay has a clear interest in supporting this research. And in turn, by collaborating with The Pirate Bay, researchers now have access to a sizable population of active file-sharers. We'll keep you posted on the results.

Both made great points, but ultimately I don't believe that frictionless sharing is a bad concept. What's more, I disagree that it has ruined sharing. What Facebook has done is re-define sharing. I think it was an ingenious move and I predict that soon Facebook's seamless sharing will be the norm.

It's Sharing Jim, But Not As We Know It...

First let's address the question of whether Facebook's frictionless sharing is, in fact, sharing as we have come to understand it on the Web. Sharing content with your social network was in many ways the backbone of the so-called Web 2.0 revolution. Think of services like YouTube (sharing videos), Delicious (sharing articles), Flickr (sharing photos) and even the first generation Facebook (sharing status updates with friends).

Yet Molly Wood concluded her article by stating that "frictionless sharing via Open Graph recasts Facebook's basic purpose, making it more about recommending and archiving than about sharing and communicating." She made a great point, because the effect of frictionless sharing is to provide an archive of you and your friends' consumption patterns. However, it is in fact both archiving and sharing.

If you installed the Washington Post Facebook app and gave it permission to publish what you read, then everything that you read on Washington Post (while logged into Facebook) is announced in your Facebook news feed. For example, "Bob Bobson read [article on Washington Post]." But wait, you may argue, Bob didn't manually share anything. All he did was read it and Facebook shared it on his behalf. But Bob gave Facebook permission to do that, when he installed the Washington Post app. So, effectively, he did choose to "share" that article into his news feed.

So Facebook has re-defined sharing. It has cunningly merged sharing with archiving.

Why This Will Soon Be The Norm

You can judge for yourself whether this form of sharing is something you're comfortable with. At this stage, I myself am wary of it. I've caught myself second-guessing which articles from the Washington Post I visit, because I know that if I click on something there it will show up in my Facebook news feed. That makes me squeemish. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I haven't gotten used to the paradigm of everything I consume showing up on Facebook.

It's really up to Facebook to make sure that I, and millions of others, do get used to it. Especially, since this form of sharing is about to go viral. Let's look at Instapaper, as an example of an app that may soon have frictionless sharing.

Facebook has stated that it will release an API that will enable any content-based service to have "frictionless sharing" - just like the Washington Post. That means content services, like Instapaper, may soon be sharing everything to Facebook.

Currently, I need to manually click a heart icon within Instapaper to like (and optionally share) an article. In my Instapaper settings, I have it set up that everything I 'like' in this manner gets sent to Facebook and Twitter. Although, ironically, for me it only works on Twitter for some reason.

I like this method of sharing, as it allows me to be selective about what I share. But it may eventually be usurped by Facebook's new definition of sharing.

What's In It For You?

It's important to note that you, the user, will always have to give your permission for frictionless sharing to happen. Over time there will be incentives to do that, in the form of value-added services that exist precisely because of seamless sharing. Sure, that's a rose-colored look at the future of frictionless sharing. But Facebook is well aware that it will need to incentivize its users if it wants this functionality turned on across thousands of content sites.

When I outlined the pros and cons of frictionless sharing at the end of September, when the feature was first introduced in Facebook, I stated that frictionless sharing will come to be seen as a masterful move by Facebook. Content services want to access Facebook's huge user base and so they will enable this feature. Facebook's size gives it the ability to make this form of sharing the norm for future generations of Internet users.

That's not to belittle the very real concerns about over-sharing and privacy, as stated eloquently by Molly and Marshall. But Facebook has identified the immense value in tapping into media consumption patterns and, in frictionless sharing, it has found an ingenious way to capture that data.

Now Facebook's challenge is to convince its users that some of that value is for the end user. Frictionless sharing is scary, there's no doubt about it. It's also not ideally implemented right now. So Facebook has work to do, both on the implementation and to show people the benefits of this new form of sharing.

Results of a study by Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research (led by Kim Gaskins) contend that indeed it has. A survey of over 500 Web users finds that people who share online are more apt to share offline, in part the study argues, because they've learned to trust each other online.

It's part of a move the authors of the research trace from an ownership economy to an access economy. In this new economy, a variety of new services have been developed in order to allow people use of an asset without having to actually buy or own it.

Share and Share Alike

Sharing was defined by participants as "borrowing or lending an item for free, seconded by co-owning something with others: essentially, exchanges that involved no monetary gain, as well as synchronous access or collaborative efforts toward a shared goal." Over half the respondents identified renting and buying and selling used items as a form of sharing.

Some of the other findings include:

• Sharing online is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline, too; 78% of participants felt that their online experiences make them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers.
• 85% of all participants believe that Web and mobile technologies will play a critical role in building large-scale sharing communities for the future.
• Age did not seem to make a difference in the propensity to share. And respondents age 40 and over were more likely to feel comfortable sharing with anyone at all who joins a sharing community, whereas younger respondents preferred to share among smaller social circles
• Three out of four participants currently share personal or informational content through social networking platforms, while 70% share digital media, and 68% share physical media like books and DVDs.
• Of those who share information and media online, two-thirds use other people's creations licensed under Creative Commons.

Opportunities for Social Startups

The report also looks at opportunities for entrepreneurs in building startups around social sharing. And those opportunities look good, considering that 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase over the next five years. The report notes in particular the opportunities in sharing transportation and physical spaces. Even though many of these services are not Internet-based, the report emphasizes the importance of the Web in building the peer-to-peer networks to facilitate sharing.

"The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where 'access' trumps 'ownership'; social value becomes the new currency; 'exchanges' replace 'purchases'; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences," says Neela Sakaria, SVP of Latitude.

Even though author Malcolm Gladwell recently contended that social media would not bring about revolution, the "New Sharing Economy" study does seem to indicate that our online interactions are having a substantial impact beyond just the realm of communication and culture.

But don't be confused if you start seeing double-posts of Flickr photos once you enable this new feature: this supplements, but does not replace the native Flickr sharing you may have configured earlier via Facebook settings.

To get started with the new Facebook integration, you must head over to this page and connect your two accounts. Afterwards, every time you upload a public photo to Flickr, you'll see the update appear on your Wall, complete with large thumbnail image, photo title and description.

Before you start posting your photos to Facebook using the new settings, though, you'll want to double-check and make sure that you've switched the older Flickr to Facebook integration off. To do so, go to Facebook and click "Wall," "Options" (at the top or your Wall), "Settings" then "Flickr." If Flickr is enabled, click "Remove." Also note that there are several third-party applications that also update Facebook with your Flickr photos, and you will need to remove them as well.

Flickr Getting into Sharing? Finally?

For a website dedicated to sharing photos with friends, family and the world, Flickr incongruously offers very limited external sharing of its photos. Click Flickr's "Share This" button and you have options to grab the link, "blog it" or share via email. Where are the other numerous social sites you would expect to see via a "Share this" link? Where's Digg? Where's StumbleUpon? Does Flickr not want to encourage serendipitous discovery of its public photos?

And where's Twitter? Photo-sharing competitors like TweetPhoto, Twitpic and YFrog are running away with the "tweet this photo" business and Flickr doesn't seem to care. Although last year Flickr introduced a way for you to tweet your photos, it's oddly hidden away under the blog settings configuration page. It's doubtful that many casual users even know the option exists.

So now Flickr likes Facebook? The Flickr blog post notes that the new feature is powered by the recently revved-up Yahoo Updates platform, whose settings can be managed over on updated Yahoo profile pages found at the pulse.yahoo.com (which, by the way, looks like a Yahoo-ized FriendFeed clone). We hope this is the start of more sharing options to come for the busy photo-sharing website, but given Flickr's track record with access to external sharing features, we won't hold our breath.

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.

This sharing feature, which Gogobeans calls "Shake to Bounce," works by using the phone's accelerometer. The company's servers register that you shook your phone, but it does not access your location. When another user then shakes his or her phone, the action causes their name appear in a list of people to share with.

This type of sharing may remind you a lot of how the Bump app works, but instead of tapping phones to share content, users are shaking their phones. However, there's a practical purpose to this feature - you don't have to be in close proximity to the other user in order to share items this way.

That means you can send photos to mom and dad across town, files to a remotely located office colleague or videos to a far-away friend, all with just a shake. The app supports sharing of applications too. But instead of simply recommending the app, a placeholder is downloaded to the device. The other user then can complete the app download process and/or purchase from the appropriate application store.

And in addition to one-to-one sharing, you can use the app to share from your phone to Twitter and Facebook.

I'm not convinced that we'll all be shaking our phones to share apps in the future, but it's interesting to see the various solutions developers have come up with to the app discovery problem. There are too many apps in the app store - even when apps are "curated" like Apple is doing. We know that personal recommendations work best, but how do you access them? Bumping phones? Sharing on Facebook? Reading blogs? App search engines?

Shaking?

Of course, app sharing isn't Gogobeans' only feature, but it's the one that addresses the biggest pain point for me: finding good apps.

Googbeans is available on iPhone and Android. Anyone want to share apps?

While Yahoo has said that it is "absolutely committed" to social picture sharing site Flickr, the same might not be said for the folks at the top of the company. Today, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg announced that he would be "stepping away from Flickr," the third such departure since Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake left in 2008.

Can Flickr hang on in the photo sharing realm or will other niche social photo sharing services and Facebook - the biggest photo sharing site on the Internet - take its place?

A number of products at Yahoo have been on shaky ground lately, with the company announcing last fall that it would shutter Delicious, MyBlogLog and Buzz. Now, as Facebook continues to dominate social photo sharing on the Web, and photo sharing apps like Instagram and PicPlz take off, confidence in Flickr's ability to stay afloat could be waning as well.

Professional photographers may also be abandoning the site, as it has had troubles lately with censorship and even accidentally deleting thousands of photos and telling the owner they were gone forever.

Does Rothenberg's departure spell serious trouble for Flickr? It could, but it doesn't sound like it does for Rothenberg himself. "And yes, I know what I'm doing next," he later tweeted, "but not announcing it just yet."

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?

As vilified as file-sharing has historically been, the practice has been gaining favor in somewhat unexpected places lately. The Songwriter's Association of Canada recently threw its support behind the idea of legalizing file-sharing and finding ways to monetize the practice, rather than cracking down on it through legal means.

"Music file-sharing is a vibrant, open, global distribution system for music of all kinds, and presents a tremendous opportunity to both creators and rights-holders," the organization stated in a proposal. "Additionally, once a fair and reasonable monetization system is in place, all stakeholders including consumers and Internet service providers will benefit substantially."

The news comes shortly after the Swiss government released a report saying that illegal file-sharing isn't a big enough problem to justify cracking down on it as harshly as is being proposed in other European countries.

Canadian songwriters are not advocating a stance quite as hands-off as that, but they do think that file-sharing ought be viewed as an opportunity for artists rather than a threat.

Still, there remains the issue of how the Internet is going to ensure that artists are properly compensated. That is still very much being ironed out. It may well be that in the long run, artists don't profit as much as they once did from selling recorded music and instead have to focus their efforts on bringing in revenue through other means. Even through legal and record label-approved means like Spotify, artists have yet to see a significant financial gain from participating.

YouTube this weekend announced that it would be stepping up its Facebook integration, allowing you to see what YouTube videos all of your friends are sharing on Facebook.

The blog also highlights "real-time sharing", saying that now, when you share YouTube videos on other social networks, it happens immediately and not 10 minutes later. We have to imagine that this has lowered the number of exasperated support requests from impatient users, as we've all come to expect things to happen instantaneously and not when the server feels like getting around to it.

As for sharing, users can automatically share videos they post on YouTube to Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. This new feature twists around the usual, making it possible for users to see what their friends are sharing on Facebook. In this case, it does not mean that they have to create the video for you to see it - if they share it, you can see that.

Facebook. Now more than ever, AddThis reports that Facebook's share of sharing grew from 33% last year to 44%. The company says that email, the second most popular method of sharing through its service, is 38% bigger than sharing on Twitter! And MySpace, though in sharp decline (down 27%), remains very popular. There are of course many different ways to share content, but these numbers from AddThis are quite interesting none the less. If you're not making it easy for website visitors to share your content by email, for example, you're probably making a big mistake.