I Share, Therefore I Am (Online)

I use dozens of Internet-based services daily. What about you? I'm sure you use email, instant messengers, various social networks, blogs, etc. All of these advanced services are usually terribly disconnected. But developers of the new Share2me application decided to do a good deed and bridge the gaps between them.

To start using Share2me you will need to download a Firefox extension to add a Share2me button to your browser's navigation bar. After that you will create a contact list that will combine all your contacts from your IM and email accounts. Currently available are MySpace, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AIM, AOL, MSN Hotmail.

Suppose you find a great song, photo, e-book or application when surfing the web. Your first desire is to share this awesome thing with your friends – and that will become really simple tomorrow when Share2me launches: you click the Share2me button, start typing in the names of your friends to use your address book (auto fill, by the way – I am sure sometimes such small things make applications actually user-friendly) and share the link with the contacts you choose. Besides, the shared content can also be shown on your MySpace profile.

Share2Me extension to be launched tomorrow only works with Firefox 1.5 or greater. But still though Firefox is supposed to be Web 2.0 browser, I think they will need to add support of Internet Explorer if they want to reach a broader audience.

There are two more things that do not work as I thought they would (judging by the description). First: I expected a larger number of IMs and email services integrated – but I'm sure that's only a matter of time. But second is more important to me: some of my contacts are present both on my Gmail, AIM and Yahoo! Mail contact lists and I expected deeper integration; for example, the system could detect by a contact's real name that several listings belong to the same person – the way it is now it all seems like a huge and somewhat too complicated address book. But the idea is good enough to wait for updates from the very beginning. By the way, now that you are reading it you can sign to their launch notification here - to start using it tomorrow.

Adding your accounts

Simple sharing