Comments on: Disconnected ShareThis plugin for Wordpress

By: Seppo

Seppo — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:27:30 +0000

I had similar experience, the customized plugin worked fine except the error page.
I changed to iBegin Share, but it has problems with character encoding, so I would get back to Rob’s nice customized Share plugin, if there is a fix for that error message problem.

By: Joseph Kulandai

Joseph Kulandai — Sat, 24 May 2008 09:17:44 +0000

Hi, I have customized and used this plugin and working well. Thanks!

After a mail is sent, the page gets forwarded to an error page! Its the same way happening in your site also. See the title of the page.

Can you please share the idea to fix that?

By: Joseph Kulandai

Joseph Kulandai — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:07:25 +0000

Excellent post! Thanks!!

By: Seppo

Seppo — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:56:49 +0000

Checked iBegin Share, and it looks quite nice. As far as I understand, it will not send information to any third party, and it logs only the pages that are being shared, but not any personal information (except IP address). Is that correct? It also is possible to translate it. And it is open source.

By: AhmedF

AhmedF — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:04:19 +0000

Rob - you should try out our iBegin Share tool (linked as my name). Fully open source, and comes with printing/pdf/Word doc support.

By: rob

rob — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:05:20 +0000

@James B: Sure, ShareThis is certainly not the *most* of my worries. I also run my own mailserver, and don’t use Google Apps, for example.

But I also get the sense that people don’t understand the possible repercussions of letting companies all over the web gather and share their information. Yes, giving them this information enables services that are valuable — and the ShareThis reports are a good example of that — but they are not “free”.

I’ve read a lot of accounts recently about women who change their “single” status to “engaged” on Facebook… and are immediately flooded with ads for wedding-related services (even if that’s the *last* thing they want to see..). One woman in this situation was aghast, and set her status back to “single” to try to avoid the ads… only to have her friends and family suddenly concerned that the engagement was off. It’s messy.

ShareThis is on a much smaller scale, though I don’t know who they will partner with along the way, and what information they will share now or in the future with paying advertisers. Notice how the terms of service on their website (like many, many places) stipulates that the terms may change at any time without notice. Why do that? I run an online business — my privacy terms are clear, and I specifically say I’ll contact users and give them the chance to opt out if the privacy terms are going to change. It’s not hard.

But it’s not the end of the world, either way — if you know the price you’re paying (however vague that price may be) and it’s worth the service you’re getting, then good. If you don’t think it’s worth it (this is where I am) then I at least want the ability to opt out.

This post was about making it easy to opt out for those who want to.

By: James B

James B — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:15:58 +0000

I have to disagree with your post. Sure, ShareThis might be tracking this data, but I love seeing the reports they generate. As a publisher and site owner, it is very important to understand where my content is going and what is being shared. If my visitors want to sign up for their free service, then even better because it will make their experience on my site better. I do agree though that the box loads a little slower, but I’m sure they are working on improving that. And, Sharethis should be the least of your worries. You might want to start worrying about Google and how deep they are getting into sites and users’ profiles.