Tell A Friend is a brand new JavaScript based widget for blogs and websites that will enable site visitors to send a link of the current web page to their friend(s) via email or through IM like Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.
Now you may ask how is this stuff any different from say, ShareThis or AddThis. True, there is some overlap but Tell a Friend service is more about email which is still the most popular way of sharing content.
For instance, your visitors can pull a list of their friends who are currently online on Gtalk or AOL and directly send them a link of the current page. Alternatively, they may select one or more contacts from their address books inside Gmail, Yahoo! or Live Hotmail and send them a message with a link to the current page.
Another reason why some publishes may like "Tell a Friend" more is because it enables their visitors to customize the message before shooting it to their friends.
Also see: Most Useful Blog Add-ons
Update: Since some of you have express concerns over sharing of user names & passwords with a third-party, Vijay Prasanna Pullur of Pramati Technologies writes:
"The problem we address is for the visitor it is not easy to remember email addresses, so it must be made convenient to access within the context of the page. For the site/blog owner, this is a great benefit because the user is not distracted going to actual email program to fetch address and they continue to stay focused. The difference between Addthis/Sharethis is that ours is for direct communication with friends, not a social bookmarking tool which is more indirect. Of course as you said there is some overlap.
One other thing is that we dont store any email or passwords and niether the address book email addresses. We just use the login to pull the address book. As a comparison, Pramati is a 10 year old company with 300 people and large customers, so some credibility to trust our promise.
The site owner also does not get access to the visitors email address or the addresses to whom he/she sent messages using Tell-a-Friend widget. So it is safe to use this widget even on sites not well known. Whereas in email a friend form the site owner is getting the email addresses."
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tell-friend-widget-for-sending-email/4199/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Amit, lot of people trust ur advice, im sure that you wont give away ur adsense or google password to any other company, however good their service is, read this even facebook is advicing users against this, please advice users against this
Written by sam on 08.11.08
I would have to agree with Sam on this. Creating a new account on “tell a friend” to try their new tools is OK. But, entering my existing yahoo, gmail, hotmail account to “tell a friend” is not something I would prefer.
I love “Share this” for the following two reasons:
1. It is very simple and doesn’t take any real estate on the page and keeps your blog layout clean.
2. It just covers every possible scenarios of sharing your post.
Written by Ramesh Natarajan on 08.11.08
I tried demo of this service available on their website. It took close to a minute to open the popup. Seems to be very slow.
Written by Gopinath M on 08.11.08
Sam, Ramesh - That’s a valid concern but I think I’ll ask someone at Pramati, the parent company, to address them here.
Gopi - Tell-a-friend popup is a bit slower than AddThis but definitely exhibits a better performance than ShareThis.
Written by Amit Agarwal on 08.11.08
Thanks for sharing. I have tell a basic tell a friend for one of my sites, but don’t readily or easily know if it’s ever been used.
Perhaps this widget might send a e-mail notification of activity to alert the site owner? Maybe it works (set as a “Goal”) with Google Analytics to easily alert site owners when it’s used…
Written by pcsourcepoint on 08.12.08
Amit, another website FreeTellAFriend.com offers a similar service. I recently covered them on my blog. you can check them out too.
Written by Darsh on 08.12.08
So what is the catch?
Do they have a small link which hits to their social networking website? Or do they just save all the email addresses and then add those emails to their newsletter?
For a website of this sort, IP blacklisting will not take more than 2 days and to survive they will need several email servers with quite a few dozen IP addresses. This will cost them a great deal… So I guess they are going to save all the emails to their newsletter or add a nice little link in each email a users sends. There has to be a way to get all the money back!
Written by Naveen on 08.12.08
anyone knows GData APIs uses oAuth ? check link and be updated with wats happening around web ..
Written by jovial on 08.27.08