There’s a new content sharing widget in town and it’s called Tell-A-Friend.
Like ShareThis and AddThis, Tell-A-Friend is placed on webpages by publishers so their visitors can easily share content with friends (we’ve placed the AddThis button at the bottom of every TechCrunch post). But unlike these existing solutions, Tell-A-Friend users can share content with their instant messaging contacts in addition to their email and social networking ones.
Tell-A-Friend supports four IM services: Yahoo, Google, AIM and MSN. When you send something via IM, the service essentially signs into your account in the background (I know this because AIM warned me that I was now signed in from two locations). It then sends an IM with the link and message you’ve provided to all the selected recipients. One big problem, though: if your recipients aren’t online, they won’t get the message, and there’s no way to check their status from the widget. (Update: This appears to be a problem on a per-service basis. For example, Gtalk supports offline messaging but AIM does not).
If you’d like to simply email a link to your friends, you can also pick recipients from your Yahoo Mail, Windows Live, or Gmail address books. Links can be sent to Wordpress, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter contacts as well. Overall, that’s 11 services – a number that pales in comparison to AddThis’s 34 and ShareThis’s 36.
Another nice characteristic of Tell-A-Friend is that it doesn’t pop up any new windows, even when sharing on social networks. But since publishers are reluctant to clutter their pages with too many widgets, Tell-A-Friend will have to add more supported services if it’s to catch on.
Pramati, the maker of Tell-A-Friend, plans to monetize the widget with a premium version that allows for branding and contests.
Interesting, I haven’t seen successful monetization play w.r.t widgets yet. Overall looks like a webmaster’s tool.
Brian, monetization would happen via the Tell-a-Friend Premium offerings.
These include branded widgets, context-wired widgets (they allow you to announce specific content from the site such as announcing a particular search result), detailed usage stats, etc.
Another premium offering is to specially purpose the widget for running word of mouth contests or for loyalty programs.
A cool tool addition when Sharethis and Addthis are both very much popular all over
Well, such a comparison is natural. But there is big difference between social bookmarking and Tell-a-Friend. Social bookmarking is telling the crowd about your interest whereas Tell-a-Friend is a personal personal recommendation to someone you know. They serve different purposes.
This is elaborated at: http://blog.soc...-a-share-button
It is another service that rather than using the APIs provided by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo for grabbing email, or Oauth, have opted to ask for email address and password.
These services, or the many scripts that are now available that allow you to do this are a security risk.
Email accounts are full of highly personal data, and are in many cases the key to whole online businesses.
Domain registration
Hosting
Monetization
Social Media Accounts
With Google, it is also the key to all their combined services, Adwords, Adsense etc.
I have been warning people for a number of months not to install scripts and for more than a year not to trust anyone with the keys to their online security.
Here is one example
http://andybear...this-first.html
Jeff Atwood has also spoken out about this
http://www.codi...ves/001128.html
Also a consideration are the actual terms of service of each email service provider.
Sure would have liked to see a direct response from Vivek on Andy’s comment above. Hope I didn’t miss something. This is a convenient tool, but at what price?? Far too often in this realm, tell a friend tools that require you to login with your email address and password are passed off as being normal and harmless…with the cavalier disclaimer of: “We do not store username and password”. I’m not a coder, but you need to do better than that.
Cool idea but a bit spammy no?
Nick, there have been anti-spamming measures and deterrents built and more are underway. For instance, in one widget use, you can send to a maximum of 20 friends from your contacts list. Tell-a-Friend is intended as a personal one-to-one communication tool and its effectiveness lies in that.
I wonder if they Gzip and Etag their javascript/images, etc. one of my biggest gripes with AddThis (which we currently use), is that they don’t Gzip, Etag or even set an expires date into the future for their stuff, so it slows down page loads sometimes.
Hello Joel,
All the big JS and images when the Tell a Friend widget is loaded are gzipped and have the Expires header set.
Regards,
Hrish,
SocialTwist.com
The one cool thing is they take the time to really show you exactly where to put the code in the HTML. For techy people this is not a bid deal but for tech morons like myself this is really nice.
I lied, can’t find the stupid code. Blah…
I can see this becoming used entirely for un-annoying purposes.
great, something to make you act like a spam bot. yay.
that is good tools we can use it for http://www.hiadults.com and let people tell their friend about this site.
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Another junk program.
Mark is becoming more fatuous. Is there any way to stop these spamies?
there’s a similar service running which called Sdalk (http://www.sdalk.com).
if someone wants to send me a link, I’d rather they e-mail me. IM links are generally associated with spam and I don’t think I would ever click on a link sent to me by IM if I wasn’t expecting it.
This is exciting. I am huge fan of instant messaging and this tool would make my life easier!
excellent all-in-one 5 of 5 stars!!!
Tell-a-Friend widget provides Email, IM, Blog and social networking channels to reach out to friends. It makes this job easy for the visitor by showing the address book right on the page.
If you have setup your IM client to block messages sent by anyone not in your buddylist, then there is no way of getting SPAM messages. Moreover, the widget shows the visitors address book and message can be sent only to people in the address book. So if you happen to be in someone’s address book most likely you have accepted them as an IM buddy.
Vijay
SocialTwist
Congratulations to SocialTwist on the launch of this widget. We signed-up right after reading Mark’s TC post. Everything is looking good so far – if you’re interested you can see the customized widget in the left-hand sidebar of FILMCOMMUNITY’s Front Page.
FILMCOMMUNITY.COM is the Social Media Network for the Film Industry Worldwide
yahoo! messenger offers offline messages since 1999, at least… one of the coolest and most useful features of the best IM application out there.
Hey Moo I very much agree with you. We need to stop the spamies!
I was thinking of doing a very nice campaign around it, where I will spread this word around the world but then thought of not going ahead with it as buying media over the TV and Radio was too expensive.
And JWT asked me a bomb just to make the Ad.
So contacting every one via the Internet seemed to be the best idea but then, I would be called a spammy who is asking people to stop sending messages that they think might be important for their friends.
Lets! All contribute to a common fund to pay JWT or, O&M to make a nice Ad film and buy media from CNN, Star, etc for 3 months, I am sure we will make a difference.
Phew! When marketeers all around the world are cutting on their budgets and looking for innovative and effective mechanisms to reach their consumer , this seems to be one of the best ways to do so.
I strongly believe “Content is the King”, and if it is good enough it will get the popularity and draw attention. Tell-a-Friend and every other similar tool/widget is a mere accessory to your online content which helps the good ones have the WOM through the viewers trusted communities.
It’s never smart to trust a 3rd party with your username and password, particularly when you can’t see the URL of the 3rd party.
I am definitely going to be adding this to my blog. I use add to any and It doesnt really seem to get any notice because the bottoms are so small. This design is definitely much better
I love the giant octopus of integration points that allow users to disperse info practically anywhere! But in some ways this is exactly what the user wants to NOT do. They want their shares to happen in specific places, the same places, that they always share their info. They ant this to happen automatically–and they want the system to know where to disperse this info…
It is really an auxiliary experience to the real point of a why use these applications–what I really want to do is share my interests with my friends and draw them to the point or place of interest through me, by connecting to me.
The underlying feeling of the user is that they want to connect with people. Broadcasting interest is not really sharing. Sharing is co-operating in a context, within an experience.
Really what I want to do is align my interests (my sharing) with my trusted social graph ( pre-set) in specific modalities at specific times (the right time every time) in the right place (Location) .
Publishers want access to me after I leave their site and they want me to bring my social graph back to their site when I am there.
See what’s up over at phlooq.com to see a system that provides more value to users and to web publishers than the “broadcast” systems of Share This, Add This or Tell a Friend.
http://phlooq.com
How is phlooq different from fb connect or opensocial friend connect?
Agree with earlier comments on tell a friend widget – requiring users to enter Yahoo/ Google/ MS account credentials is tough sell.
The difference is that the Web brand delivers the visitors interest via a feed to any and all social networks the user has “mashed” into the widget set-up. In fact PhlooQ needs and plugs-into Facebook and/or Open Social. We LOVE FB and Open Social’s APIs and FriendFeeds!!
In addition, Publisher is feeding a link that pulls the visitor’s social graph from back to their property.
In addition, PhlooQ shows the user of the widget who is NEARBY that might be interested in attending the same event, venue, or location. PhlooQ shows the user of the widget their friends who are nearby and are likely interested.
PhlooQ then lets the Widget user click-2-call their friends, text their friends, or message their frinds in their native social graph a la Facebook notifications or such…
tweet me @davidkoehn for more blurbing…
We have used the Tell-a-friend widget on our blog site..and it’s pretty cool. Much appreciated by some of the visitors.
ok ! great job ! I came across this site http://www.sdalk.com and they are giving similar service too … simpler and strait forward !
I use this widget for my web site and I am really in lvoe with the concept however, I think the developer of this widget needs to design it so that this widget can work with all web browser version, because some time it does not work and javascript error
Totally agree.