04 Mar 09 Social fragmentation and sharing

If the trend is toward greater fragmentation in social media, then what does this mean for companies like Share This?

RRW noted the upgrades to their widget, but have they missed a large piece of the puzzle? particularly when fragmentation and decentralisation are becoming all the rage?

The problem is, people belong to different communities for different reasons, and share different things within them – different content being suitable for different communities – everyday becoming more niche in their point of focus and congregation.

So clearly, adding more and more buttons is an unsustainable direction – even providing a search box would seem like a bad idea. What is required is to have detection of the communities that you belong to in the browser, and the standard interface being default when this can’t be detected. The other alternative is to have a community upload section on the share this site which would allow access to emergent communities. The default buttons could then be determined by sharing user defined communities, sharing clicks per page.

This would allow more tailored and relevant niches grow alongside the content relevant to those communities, providing the user with more relevant communities choices on the initial interaction, but also providing content with more targeted and relevant audiences.