The Highly Secretive Google Share Gadget And How You Can Use It In Your Blog

If you have seen any page in Google Knol, like this one, then you would have noticed a Share widget in it. It is based on the Google Share widget, a service which Google doesn't like to talk much about. The home page of the widget doesn’t provide much information and Google doesn’t seem to be too interested in promoting it either.

We did some testing on this share gadget and found it to be highly usable and quite addictive. As a matter of fact, you don’t need to have even a Google account to use this widget which is a great advantage over the similar, competing gadget ShareThis, where you need to register to use it in your blog. Using this share widget, you can add a web page to your Google Shared stuff page, email the entire page or just its link to your friends, and bookmark the page in all social networking sites like delicious, digg, reddit, facebook etc.

The Google share gadget can be added to your blog or website quite easily. Just copy and past the following code where you want the link to appear. It adds a ‘Share this post’ link, which on clicking will display the Google Share Widget page.

<a href="#" onclick="var a=document,b=a.createElement('script'),w=window,g={};g.altWindow=w.open('','_blank','height=370px,width=720px,toolbar=no,directories=no,status=no,menubar=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no');setTimeout(function(){g.altWindow.focus()},1000);function f(o){try{var d=new google.share.EmailWidget(g);d.display()}catch(e){if(o>20)return;setTimeout(function(){f(o+1)},o<10?1<<o:1000)}};b.src='<a href="http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/js?script=socialsharing%27;a.body.appendChild%28b%29;f%280%29%22">http://www.google.com/s2/sharing/js?script=socialsharing';a.body.appendChild(b);f(0)"</a>>Share this post</a>

To spice up the link, you can use some images like this one, which has become a de-facto symbol for a share gadget. Try it out by clicking the below share gadget.

Share this

Related: How You Can Get Increased Traffic By Adding a Yahoo Buzz Up Button To Your Blog