The URL bar is Deep Magick to most people, requiring rituals most foul and loathsome to work with, such as the forbidden incantation of Copius Pastious. Less than one in ten simple villagers understand such vile sorcery, and most of those can only use it via the Scroll of Copius Pastious conveniently inserted into the Word Ribbon by the Mad Monks of Microsoftine.
Less sardonically, even techies seem to get their share-this-with-people neurotransmitters activated by seeing sharing widgets. Its a call to action. People respond to those. My subjective experience back when Delicious buttons didn't suck was that for two roughly equivalent pieces of geek-friendly reference material putting the Delicious button on was worth 10x Delicious saves.
(I hate all the other buttons and rarely use them. That might well be irrational -- I've heard on HN from folks at e.g. TechCrunch that they're worth measurable money to the business.)
Good point! It seems that what would make most sense is to move the sharing buttons onto the browser, no?
Mobile Safari does a great job of this with the bookmark/mail link to this page/add to home screen/etc. button, heck even Twitter is catered for as of iOS5. Maybe if desktop browsers had similar functionality we'd see less of this noise on the page.
Good deal that too: get the crud off the actual page and sacrifice but one toolbar button that (like the search bar) has a pull down with all of your selected networks. That makes it more elegant in appearance and opt-in by default.
...seems so obvious, maybe there are already extensions for this?
The "share" icon/menu-item is very common in Android applications too. Seems like the more modern apps and OS's are on top of this and desktop browsers just need to catch up. Firefox does have a "Send link..." menu item, but that appears to assume one means to use email... a somewhat dated assumption.
