There are two easy way to share on the Social Web – one is Implicit Sharing whereas the other one is Explicit Sharing.
Have you ever noticed that some of the websites are designed for sharing? It includes Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. However I think they aren’t all the same. For example, Delicious is more social but Facebook is more private. Why are the ways of sharing different? This is because their aims and focuses are of a different direction.
The focus of Delicious is social bookmarking, just because it is social, when we want to use Delicious, we would share all our stuff via the website. Otherwise we will use Bookmarks in Browsers instead. So it should be Implicit Sharing.
But Flickr, another acquisition from Yahoo! is quite different. Some Internet users may use Flickr as their online photo storage since they don’t really need to fork out a single cent, and keep it private. On the other hand, the rest will use Flickr as a photo sharing platform to interact with others and comment about them. That is different from Delicious as we do not have other local tools to do the same thing, only Internet can keep our photos online. It’s not completely social, hence it’s known as Explicit Sharing.
The core of Twitter is “What are you doing?” so why does Twitter ask you? This is because it wants to tell this to others. Everyone wants more followers, that means everyone want to share tweets to more friends. So, obviously it is Implicit Sharing.
Although Facebook has the same function as Twitter’s, but it’s just sharing with friends, even being friends have to confirm. So that means Facebook is much more private, and the detail profile or other stuff can only be accessed by verified friends, and you can control what to share and who to share. That’s Explicit Sharing.
Other social websites can also have one of these ways to share. For example, Amazon is Implicit Sharing because your reviews are written for everyone to read. GMail is Explicit Sharing because you will forward the emails which you want to share. LinkedIn need to confirm friends too, so it is also Explicit Sharing. YouTube is always Implicit Sharing because your upload action means you want to share.
So which types of sharing do you prefer – Implicit or Explicit Sharing?