Small change over at our sister service Bzzster!, we’re simplifying its name to - Buzzster!

Over the past two years, we heard all sorts of varying pronunciations of “bzzster” and thought we’ll just make it easier for everyone :) Hope you like it! More to come.

What is the Open Share Icon? The Open Share Icon is designed to help users easily identify shareable content. A new, truly open, free and more flexible community-driven icon. The icon is freely available for use in connection with content sharing, in all its forms.

Today, I am pleased to announce that the Open Share Icon has a new website!

Why do we need another icon?

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and it of course it took me a couple extra days to actually get these thoughts down, so here goes.

Background:

What started back in November 2007 with a take-down request sent to Shareaholic, turned into much much more thanks to a great web community.

Way back, the original Share Icon - - was designed with community input, and driven and popularized by Alex King and his popular wordpress plugin. We at Shareaholic bought into Alex’s mission for a standardized sharing icon, and were glad to include the icon within our products to further the cause.

Then it began:

A few months later Alex sold both the icon and his wordpress plugin to ShareThis/Nextumi, Inc. Ordinarily, this would have been fine, but unfortunately the new owners decided to change the license terms without notice, and subsequently sent Shareaholic a take-down request.

After some back and forth, we decided to comply with ShareThis.com’s request and stopped using the icon. Shareaholic was a side-project back then, but I guess big enough to make ShareThis.com a little nervous!

It just wasn’t worth it to us to spend the time or money fighting for it, even though we likely had a very good case since the icon was originally released under several Open Source licenses. In any case, at this point we had lost all trust in the new owners of the icon, and their intentions.

ShareThis has since changed back the licensing terms on their website to the icons original terms, but really, nothing prevents them from sending us or anyone else another take down request. They’ve done it before, and they can do it again.

The community rallies - yay!:

Thankfully, the web community picked up on what had happened, and decided to rally behind us to establish and support an alternative to the Share Icon that was free from the restrictions imposed by ShareThis.com. As a community, we felt that ShareThis.com’s actions did not reflect the original spirit with which the original share icon was created, and hence felt the need for a new, truly open, free and more flexible community-driven approach. As a result of this effort — the Open Share Icon was born!

The final design for the Open Share Icon is based on a lot of community input. We hope you like it. All we hope is that users of the Open Share Icon will use the icons in the spirit in which they are intended, and just play fair.

You can learn all about the Open Share Icon here, and join the conversation in our Google Group here.

I’m very thankful to the folks at AddtoAny, SmugMug, OneRiot, Scribefire, and countless more organizations, and all the volunteers and community members that stepped up to join the Open Share Icon effort for all their awesome hard work. A special shout out to Frank Dobbelaere, David Hall and Bruce McKenzie (coordinator: GeoTag Icons), and David Cancel for all their special help and support. Truly, thank you.

We pushed out Shareaholic v1.7 this afternoon! You can get the latest version of Shareaholic from here, or you if you already have Shareaholic installed, just wait for Firefox to automatically notify you of the update.

If you use the NoScript Firefox Add-on, make sure you read this.

If you have any suggestions whatsoever, please do let us know. We’d love your feedback.

What’s new:

• You asked for it, you got it :) v1.7 adds support for:
  • Amazon Wishlist
  • Diigo
  • Evernote
  • Google Notebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Posterous
  • Sphinn
  • Techmeme Tip
  • Tr.im
• We’re big fans of this: We’ve added the option to turn on the Shareaholic button in the URL bar right next to the orange RSS icon. We feel that this is a very natural place for the icon to live within the browser. It is turned off by default, one can turn it on from Shareaholic’s option menu.

  

• We can now toggle the main nav menu button on/off from the option menu. You have complete control.
• All services in the services drop down have keyboard shortcuts associated with them now.
• Cleaned up Options menu – services are now categorized to make them easier to go through

  

• Fixed edge case issues with Gmail, Google Bookmarks
• Updates to Twine, Soup.io, Twitter code
• Misc. performance tweaks

Some users have reported that NoScript (a very popular Firefox add-on) by default blocks certain scripts from some services like FriendFeed, Twitter, etc that need to run in order to share links with them.

For you to overcome this in the least troublesome way, we’ve compiled a whitelist for NoScript of all services that Shareaholic supports.

To use the whitelist:

1. Save the latest white list file to your desktop
2. Go to NoScript “Options”
3. Select the “Whitelist” tab -> click “Import”
4. Select the file you just saved to your desktop, and that’s it.

This should fix most issues with sharing while using NoScript.

Last week I attended the MIX09 conference in Las Vegas. At the conference, Microsoft announced the release of its next major web browser - Internet Explorer 8.

It was a lot of fun attending MIX09 (thank you Tobias and Robert!), the Add-on-Con CodeFest (hosted by IE8 and OneRiot), and most of all meeting all the people behind Internet Explorer 8.

With the assistance of the IE8 team at the Add-on-Con CodeFest, I was able to complete an Accelerator for IE8 that lets anyone share information with other services such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, and a variety of other services within the IE8 browser — very similar to Shareaholic for Firefox. It can be downloaded here.

The highlight of the event for me was the inclusion of Shareaholic in the IE8 release keynote by Dean Hachamovitch, the GM of Internet Explorer. It was certainly a privilege, and I enjoyed every minute of it!

I stitched together this short 02:53 video from the main keynote recording. Hope you like it!
Full keynote video can be viewed here.

It didn’t take long to go from nothing to keynote ready. IE8 is a step in the right direction in making it easier for developers wanting to extend Internet Explorer easily — however I do already have a wish list for the IE8 team :)

A big thank you for your support, for without which none of this would be possible. Lots more coming very soon - stay tuned! Also, please keep those suggestions coming, we’re listening.

Get Shareaholic for IE8 now! >