My Take on the New Social Media Web Toolbars
by Steven Rossi on April 15, 2009 in On the Web
These new social media web frame toolbar things (there’s got to be a more succinct name here) have been the talk of the town lately, as many, many bloggers have whined about them and even more twitterers have shared their opinions. Google, StumbleUpon, Digg, and others have recently introduced little toolbars that overlay inside a web page. I’ve been thinking about them, as well, and I think I’ve made up my mind: I’m pretty much against them. Why? Three reasons: (1) They take up valuable screen real estate. (2) They look cluttered. (3) They have to reload each time a new page loads.
Now, these first two reasons are pretty subjective, and others might not mind them. Some would argue that replacing these in-page toolbars with software toolbars would cause the user to lose even more space, and I would certainly agree with that. The only difference is that you could turn off a browser toolbar when you don’t want to see it, versus a web toolbar to which you’re forcefully subjected. Furthermore, some people don’t mind the look of these guys, which is fine by me.
The third reason, however, really gets me. From a developer’s standpoint, why would I ever want to put one of these on my site? I’m constantly trying to speed my site’s load time; why would I want to intentionally add something which will slow down the user experience on every page?
I’ve created to the left an image with a quadruple-bar, inspired by some other people who’ve joked about this “double bar” problem. Obviously, this one is just a mock-up, but you can imagine that it wouldn’t be all that difficult to see this kind of thing in the wild.