At ShareThis we are constantly looking for ways to make it easy for users to share content they find interesting with their friends and followers. To this end, we recently released two key features to our popular sharing widget.

Multi-Post helps users share content to several social networks in one step. You click the ShareThis button on a page; choose the social networks you wish to share to, enter an optional comment and share. You are done. Your content is now shared to these social networks and is visible to your friends.

ShareThis will remember your choices the next time and highlight the previously selected choices by default. Multi-Post is provided using the Open Authentication Protocol, OAuth for short, an industry-accepted standard that allows users to permit 3^rd party application such as ShareThis to share to their social networks. This permission step occurs once and is subsequently remembered by ShareThis. OAuth is safe, secure, and strictly opt-in; meaning users may revoke these permissions any time. Multi-Post is currently supported for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and Yahoo.

Fast-Share is a complementary feature to Multi-Post; the main objective is to help users share quickly to a single social network of their choice through a 1-click step. When users visit sites implementing ShareThis they see a green check mark on the social network icons into which they have authenticated (i.e. OAuth). If they hover over the icon (e.g. Facebook) a small window pops up to enter an optional comment and share. A good analogy is FasTrak lanes on toll roads; cars with FasTrak move through toll booths quickly compared those in the regular lanes.

Both these features benefit publishers by i) promoting their content to more social networks ii) removing friction from the sharing process and iii) keep the user engaged on your site instead of leaving to complete a share.

The features described above are available with the release of our new Multi-post widget. We realize that some of our Publishers that like our tried and true experience of sharing without asking for information up front. While this experience still helps an audience to share content and provides some baseline information to the Publisher, it’s without the ease of integration into the social networks that has become so prevalent across a consumer’s experience across the web. We call this the Classic widget, and it is available for download here: http://www.sharethis.com/get-the-button

At ShareThis we are always looking at ways to deliver a great user experience while creating value for our publishers. If you have any feedback or comments, please don’t hesitate to send it along: nanda@sharethis.com

by Nanda Kishore, CTO, ShareThis, Inc.