Malaysian Sharein Tickles Real Potential!

• Sharein

“The goal is convenience, to make it easy for the user...It’s not a power tool, but for the average user who wants to share.”

- Colin Wong (CEO, Sharein)


SHAREIN?

Sharein is an easy-to-learn/use tool that allows you to bookmark, rate, share, and discuss your internet discoveries with your friends in an efficient manner. You can share your favorite content via email with your friends or you may post it to Twitter or Facebook being the latest features launched. They will also shorten your link (URL) using a URL Shortening Service at tr.my. Also, you can always bookmark a link for future reference and sharing to your friends.

Interestingly, Sharein enables you to get more insight into how people are consuming your discoveries. It tracks total views, reach, re-tweets, comments etc. to help you better understand how viral your discovery is. The Bookmarklet tool also enables you to personalize your discussions into different private groups, such as family, work friends, school friends or to your social network. You can have the satisfaction of knowing how your friends enjoyed your share through their votes and discussions.

LIKE

• All-In-One Idea (still not there, though!)
  It combines the ability to bookmark, rate, share, discuss and track your internet discoveries all-in-one.
  
  
• Tracking
  It enables you to get more insight into how people are consuming your discoveries in textual and visual format. Really cool! Thumbs up to this feature. Other social bookmarking tools needs learn a few tricks from here!
  
  
• Personalized Sharing
  Enables you easily to share to who you want in an efficient manner (including groups and privacy), whether it is your work buddies or friends in where-not-know.
  
  
• Speed-to-Share
  Within 2-3 of clicks you have shared what you want, compared to 6-8 clicks using traditional e-mail. If you share a lot (please do!), then it makes a 'Ca-Wa-Banga' difference.
  

DON'T LIKE

• Limited Sharing Options
  Why only Twitter and Facebook! Please add more soon! At least to other widely used social bookmarking, social networking and blogging sites. Don't need to use tabs (as it will clutter and confuse the average user), but perhaps checkboxes or a drop-down menu would do the trick.
  
  
• Bookmarking Tool
  It is miles behind Delicious and Diigo, which is kind of expected. However, to avoid putting too much effort to compete (think win-win!), why not make it easier to directly post your discoveries to widely used social bookmarking sites, if the user wants (I want!). It only requires a few lines of code to make it happen, so I predict this will be available by the time you read this (Not you!).
  
  
• One-Discovery Sharing
  Although, I am not an average user and a hyper discovery sharer, I believe this tool should also provide us the option to share multiple discoveries in one-shot (Select checkbox or simply 'All') to multiple tools. Keep it real, keep it simple! One shot, bang!

FINAL VERDICT

Will I use it?
Nope (perhaps in the future)! If people are interested in what I share, they can always RSS whatever I share. Anyway, I can easily share to Twitter and Facebook using Delicious in one shot. The only thing that is missing, is Sharein's cool tracking feature. But then again with at least Twitter, we have enough tools to tell us A-Z about whether our discoveries, or tweets are making any impact.


Will I recommend Sharein to others?
Although, I will probably not use it, I would actually strongly recommend it to average users, or users that like to share links (URLs) to particular aliens or groups. Why waste time using traditional e-mail (like Gmail!), when Sharein makes it easier and faster. Though, they really need to get that multiple link sharing feature up and running soon.

The fact that I am writing about it on a Sunday morning (started 6.45 am!), should indicate that there is something special about Sharein. Also, this blog is about juicy stuff, and not constructed to slaughter every crappy tool out there. There are enough blogs doing that already.

In short, I am thrilled to see a Malaysian web 2.0 tool making waves, and I do hope that they really kick-off in the coming months. Also, we need to keep in mind, that the CEO (Colin Wong) used to work for Google, meaning he should know something about what makes people Google, and embed that Googleness into Sharein (in a original and innovative way!).

Sharein needs a bit tweaking and feature enhancements, but with Web 2.0 technologies that can be done within a blink-of-an-eye, and it wouldn't surprise me that by the time you read this, some of my dislikes have been crushed.

Finally...

Malaysia Boleh! Seriously, a Two Thumbs Up :)