There has been much debate throughout my career over which sharing tool is the best to use. While people often opt to use Add This or Share This I am convinced that the best tool for the job is one by Social Twist called Tell a Friend. What makes this tool the most valuable in my opinion may not be apparent upon first glance. Furthermore, the button options are not as clean and neat as the simple square icons available from Add This or Share This. However, the real value to this service is two fold. First, usability wise it is the easiest to use and involves the least amount of steps by the user to share. Second, it is unobtrusive and remains an aside to what the user is doing - which is browsing your site.

Looking further into its usability. To complete sharing on Tell a Friend with a contact in your email, one simply opens the tool, clicks on the email tab, logs into their email service - right there on that sharing service overlay - and immediately is connected to their full address book of contacts so that they can share with as many people as they want. Comparably, when sharing with Add This, the user is taken to a generic email sharing overlay. If the user happens to know the email addresses of the people who they want to email great - they will share and close out the overlay and return to what they were doing. If not, they have to click again to choose which email service they want to use and are then prompted to sign into the coordinating service in a new window which opens in the browser. Once they have sent their message, they return to the site they were on after the email sharing window closes jarringly and without prompt.

The user is also not provided at that point with any other encouragement to share further using other mediums such as facebook or Digg, etc. They would have to re-start the whole process to continue sharing in another program. Share This is similar in many of those same respects although it does offer the option to users to "share again" after they complete sharing once, so that is a little bit better, but again they aren't shown all of the other options at that time, they have to consciously think if there is any other medium where they want to share before they click the "share again" link.

On the other hand, with Tell a Friend, after the user has completed sharing with any of their email, social, im, bookmark, or blog services they can easily switch tabs and just keep on sharing. They can also always see what other options are available, so its a no brainier. This means more opportunities to share before they close out the single sharing overlay and return to the page they were on. These small distinctions make all the difference in my opinion

Next, taking a closer look at how obtrusive and distracting these tools are, I again have to compliment Tell a Friend for its small overlay and clever functionality which keeps the user engaged in the site they are on rather than getting pulled into one of the many sites on which they are using to share (facebook, Twitter, Digg, Blogger, etc). For example, if you decide you want to Tweet about about something you are reading on a site, you click on the Tell a Friend button, choose Twitter, log into your twitter account (you guessed it) on that same unique overlay, and then edit the message (if desired), and press the tweet button. A small second window opens up to notify you that a tweet has been posted but this window is not the Twitter site at all and it does not allow you to move from that post you just added, to your full site to check out what others are tweeting or to see if you have any new followers.

To a site owner, this is genius as the user stays engaged on their site, continues browsing, and gets out of the site hopefully what they came for. On the other hand, if you choose to share via Twitter using a program such as Share This, the user is then provided with a dangerous link that says "View it on Twitter" which then takes the user to his/her own Twitter account. Add This offers the same opportunity for users to enter into the Twittersphere. If that happens, the likelihood that the user comes back to the original site is not high. Especially if your site users are anything like me, where all it takes is a glance at the latest Tweets from my friends to grab my attention and cause me to leave whatever else I was doing.

Ultimately, not every single sharing medium on Tell a Friend works the same exact way but overall as far as usability, opportunities for increased sharing, and unobtrusiveness, Tell a Friend definitely beats out the other popular sharing tools. Tell your friends.