Based on last week’s performance analysis of popular sharing-services (AddThis, ShareThis and Lockerz/AddToAny) I decided to continue working on my high-performance & privacy-respecting but rather ad-hoc lyteShare alternative. The result is a 1.6Kb JavaScript file (or the non-minimized version here) that, upon being included in a HTML-file, looks for a div like this one:
<div class="lyteShare twitter googleplus facebook"></div>
and adds sharing-buttons for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to that div (Linkedin, Yammer and Tumblr are also supported). You can see lyteShare.js in action on this test-page. The webpagetest.org test result is great when compared to that of the big boys;
ShareThis | AddThis | Lockerz/ AddToAny | lyteShare.js | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Document Complete | 0.677s | 0.487s | 1.352s | 0.364s |
Start Render | 0.715s | 0.279s | 0.304s | 0.275s |
Fully Loaded | 1.507s | 3.718s | 1.407s | 0.596s |
Full Download size | 70 KB | 384 KB | 111 KB | 9 KB |
WebPageTest URL | sharethis result | addthis result | lockerz/ addtoany result | lyteshare result |
3rd party tracking? | yes | yes | yes | no |
Now the question is; does the world really need yet another social sharing widget solution, even if it is easy, fast & not a vehicle for 3rd party behavioral web tracking? Does the world (and this blog) even need social sharing widgets at all?
I never use sharing widgets or the “like” button, I prefer pasting the URL inside Facebook.
Paranoia?
That’s not paranoia, that’s knowing what is going on behind the scenes 🙂
Looks good.
How hard would it be to add:
Opengraph data (properly so if it’s a single page it features that image or video, not the generic website image)
Retrieving number of previous shares? (a major performance hit I’d think)
opengraph would have to be server-side I suppose, whereas lyteshare is clientside (javascript).
getting previous shares could be done in javascript, but will lead to a performance degradation as you’d have to first source in the javascript libraries for facebook, google+, twitter, … to only then be able to make the actual request for the number of shares.
What do you mean what’s going on behind scenes? I have read also your other article Frank about 3rd party tracking. I guess it is that what Pieter mean. I am using sharethis. Are they tracking me? Why and what? Also yoast is tracking. What is weird about this plugin hare this, if I share some post in my facebook groups i often have there hooked a porn paged instead of the post I have shared there is a porn! It is realy weird and it never happened to me with previous sharing plugins. I seriously did not watch any porn on this computer so it realy could not get hooked from the browser or so. It kind of freaked me out. And how it happens.. What I do is I hit several times(10) facebook share button to share in my 10groups, it opens in new tabs and then I fill there the text and share. And then most of the times one of that 10 is porn. Not always. I was thinking perhaps it is doing facebook. It is realy serious for me as we have more then 10.000people on the social networks and do not want realy give them bad impression:-(
HI July 🙂
ShareThis (and most other social sharing buttons) do collect your users information as stated in their privacy policy..
Regarding the porn; no idea what is happening there, really.