Digg, Facebook and Google: Whose toolbar is it anyway?

April 2, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

News aggregator Digg and social network Facebook have been working together for many months to let their users share links to news articles and other content between the two sites. In the latest example of that, the new Digg toolbar inserts itself over the web page that you’re on and lets you share the page on Facebook. But what happens when your friends on Facebook see the link — a digg.com URL — and click on it? They see both Facebook’s toolbar, which the social network places over external links and beneath it, and Digg’s toolbar.

Same if you try to share a Facebook URL on Digg. Google Friend Connect also has a toolbar that blogs can install so it shows up on any blog URL page. Share such a blog through Digg onto Facebook and you see a total of three toolbars.

Maybe people want to share and see stats about the article on both Digg and Facebook, but I worry what the consequences might be for user interfaces if too many more sites begin offering these toolbars: a long list of toolbars confronting you when you follow a link, with the article itself buried somewhere at the bottom.

All of these companies want you to use their own toolbar. But let’s hope they can figure out a more elegant interface for sharing information across sites.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.