to share to a different site, why must i "email" story instead of "share" story?

i want to share something to G+. when i click on “share this story” i get an option to send to facebook, but not G+ even though i have G+ checked in my preferences. it appears that in order to share to G+, i must pretend i’m going to email the story instead, and only there is the G+ button to be found. but there’s a FB button there too.

this raises a couple questions:

  • what is the difference between the ‘email’ facebook share and the ‘share’ facebook share?
  • why is sharing to G+ and facebook part of the email menu at all, and not the share menu?
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So sharing on NewsBlur is sharing to your blurblog. When you select Facebook/Twitter/AppDotNet, your shared story gets cross-posted, with a link back to your blurblog.

Right-clicking on story titles opens the Send To menu. There you get linked to the native sharing dialogs of the sites you choose (Google+, etc).

hmmm, okay, i guess thinking of it as “sending” rather than “emailing” that makes sense, though at no point is the “send” action communicated. it explicitly says “email”, which is very misleading/confusing. perhaps you might reconsider the language/design of the menu to make it more intuitive?

i’ve included the (confusing) menu screenshot, as well as a mockup for what might be more intuitive.

for the record, i’m very happy with the ‘e’ hotkey.

Yeah, you’ve got the idea. Email is just the default send to and takes the entire line. I agree that it could be confusing. I’ll noodle on it and see if I have any better ideas. I think it needs some default action so it acts more like other menu items.

OK, deployed a less confusing email menu item. Thanks for your help!

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well, sharing to the blurblog via the RMB menu doesn’t have a default action, it needs to be committed somehow (either by adding a comment or just clicking the ‘share’ button). the same is true of the intelligence trainer. so not having a default action doesn’t necessarily disrupt the user experience, since 2 of the 5 options already behave that way.

also, it might make sense to add a ‘send to…’ button alongside the train/share/save buttons. again, train and share don’t have default actions, so it wouldn’t be weird to add another button that contained a few options. not only would adding a send button make the distinction between sharing and sending more intuitive, or at least easily divined, it would create parity with the RMB menu.

i don’t think adding a button would create too much clutter; the existing buttons are already so unobtrusive i only notice them when i want to, and they never get in the way of feed content. adding one more wouldn’t change that.

i realize this is getting more into idea/sug territory. sorry. thanks for looking into it.

oops! i wrote that before i saw your follow up. thanks for the quick attention!

augh I never realised this! So those things I had selected as “sharing services” are showing up as “sending services”. Well that’s a start. Happy day.

I think adding a ‘send to’ button alongside the train/share/save buttons would make a ton of sense.