New blog design means new sharing. New sharing means fiddling around with code provided by the platform providers – some of which is (vastly) better than others.

Due to constraints in the design, buttons may need to be reloaded on the page. For a “single” page with one post, this doesn’t matter. However, I wanted share to work on pages with multiple posts, such as the homepage. Due to the design (in the modal popup) the buttons would have to be regenerated depending on which share button was clicked. Easy enough to do with the data, but what about the buttons themselves?

This may seem overly complex but it has a number of advantages. The platform providers get less data about users by the buttons being rendered on-demand. It also means the page loads quicker, and we can load up the buttons while the fancy modal animation is happening, resulting in a much better experience for users.

LinkedIn’s is the worst button in this regard. You have to load the same two scripts to get it to render a button each time. One of these scripts binds itself to window.IN, and won’t let you load it twice unless you unset this in between. Bit impractical. There is also no Iframe implementation which could work around this problem.

Facebook and Twitter both have JavaScript implementations, but these don’t work when you try and re-render them. Therefore I used the Iframe implementations. Unfortunately the Twitter button seems to ignore some of its parameters in the Iframe mode (such as the large button size, despite their docs saying otherwise). Both of these result in an experience that is less than perfect – the JS implementations give you nice modal popups, whereas the Iframes generate popup windows. Fairly easy to re-render though.

The Google +1 button is by far the best code. You only need load one script on page load, then you can call a global function to re-render buttons at any time. So you simply need to drop a new element and then call the function to get it rendered (very quickly, as a matter of fact) and you’re done.

+1, Facebook and LinkedIn all support extra information from pages for their posting. Facebook and LinkedIn both use OpenGraph, which is reasonable as it only uses meta tags. LinkedIn is a bit picky about thumbnail size but not too bad. +1 uses Schema.org, which requires a bit more effort and some more elements (you also have to modify the HTML opening tag) but it’s also fairly easy to implement. Twitter’s share button doesn’t do any of this and accepts parameters into the Iframe, which seems ok but it doesn’t automatically shorten the text to the right length of the tweet for you which is a bit annoying. LinkedIn seems to have some problems picking up OpenGraph data from the share button too, if it hasn’t been crawled before – it just doesn’t populate any data in the popup.

All in all, a relatively painful experience for what should have been as simple as what you have to do for the +1 button four times over.

I am pleased to announce the free online release of my review of the impact of the social web for 2010.

This work was completed as part of a University module entitled “Social, legal and ethical aspects of engineering” (and known as SLEASE). Entitled “Social, Legal and Ethical Aspects of online Communities and Social Networks”, the report focussed on the main issues facing social networking online in the last quarter of 2010.

The report presents hundreds of reference sources, from Reddit conversation threads and TechCrunch articles through to research papers and Anonymous press releases. The report then gives a succinct summary of the activities of the Reddit Political Action Committee, Twitter’s community, the Yahoo/Delicious debacle and all of the important events of the end of the year.

A note on licensing: this report is free to download and share, but please do not extract parts from the main body of the document. A note to fellow students: this report is provided for information only – plagiarism will get you thrown out of University.

Download the report

There’s been some uproar (somewhat undeservedly, in my opinion at least) over the new trending alerts bar thingy that turned up in Twitter for iPhone with its last update. So much so that some clever person decided to tag it the #dickbar – which promptly became a trending topic for a number of days.

Looks like Twitter do have a sense of humour about all of this though – check out the #dickbar that Twitter constructed in their office:

It is with great pleasure that I announce my latest open-source adventure in the form of Twiq.

Twiq is a little applet for Windows that allows you to quickly tweet a message you come up with and then get straight back to work.

Too many times I have forgotten something funny, useful or generally tweetable while I wait for a web browser and Twitter.com or a client to load. No longer! Twiq is always listening just a keypress away (Ctrl+Win+Space in fact) to get that tweet dispatched efficiently.

You can’t read tweets with Twiq, but then you’d get distracted from whatever you’re working on. The flow for creating a tweet with Twiq has been designed to be super-smooth. Ctrl+Win+Space brings up the program, and puts your cursor in the tweet box; 140 taps gets you a witty, thoughtful, or useful tweet; press Return and your tweet is dispatched; Ctrl+Win+Space gets rid of Twiq and you back to work.

By popular demand – a screenshot of Twiq in action:

Twiq is free and open-source. The code is on Github, and you can get the latest installer from there too.

In terms of Twitter clients on Google’s Android mobile operating system, you’re not spoilt for choice. Among the many many clients that have appeared out there, the three “big guns” are actually pretty different. Twitter’s own, Seesmic’s and TweetDeck’s offerings each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Having given them all a good go over the past few days, I’ve come up with why I don’t really get along with any of them.