Send this post to a friend.

December 27, 2007 5:45 AM

SuggestionFilter: A link or button that enables us to easily tell our friends "Hey, check out this really cool FPP/asinine question/metatalk whinefest!"

I'm thinking along the lines of the "Send this article to a friend" links you find on most newspaper sites. Yes, yes, I can copy and paste the URL from my address book into an e-mail, but this would be sexier, no? And it would facilitate word-of-mouth recruitment into our cult cabal community.

posted by desjardins to Feature Requests at 5:45 AM (64 comments total)

I may be an outlier for this sort of thing, but I sort of like the fact that feature doesn't exist. Whenever I see one of those, I assume that my email address is being gathered by some email spam cannon production. Plus I'm not sure there's anything sexer than cut n' paste. Especially in the example you use "check out this asinine question" seems like it would attract the people we sometimes see in AskMe who signed up just so they could botch out the OP about something. I may be wishing for bygone days, but any under-the-radar-ness that MeFi has I sort of enjoy.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:54 AM on December 27, 2007 [8 favorites]

This feature exists. It's called Email.

Oh, you wanted something in-house?

It's called MeFi Mail.
posted by absalom at 5:56 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

jessamyn, I understand what you're saying. I guess I have an implicit trust that Matt's not using my e-mail for evil purposes. (Now, cortex, on the other hand, who knows....)

absalom, if I want to notify another MeFite of an FPP in which they might be interested, I have to copy the URL, track down their profile, click on send MeFi mail, and compose the message. If I want to send it to my mom, who's not a MeFite, now I have to open a tab with Gmail, log in, etc. What I'm talking about would do that for you in one click; all you'd have to do is enter their MeFi username (or an outside e-mail address).
posted by desjardins at 6:04 AM on December 27, 2007

Has anybody here ever used on of the "Send this article to a friend" link on some other site?
If anybody ever used one to send something at me, he'd quickly get a snarkgram back saying "gee, thanks for the spam".
posted by signal at 6:11 AM on December 27, 2007 [2 favorites]

In both Firefox and Internet Explorer, you can do this via the file menu. If you use Firefox, you can get a more advanced universal version of this feature with the Send Page by Email extension.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:15 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yes, yes, I can copy and paste the URL from my address book into an e-mail

Okay! Cool!

Seriously, this is would be a lot of buildup for a really small time-saver. We've had discussions before about the merits of mefi being a little bit Hard in some ways, which I think might apply here -- I'd much rather get an email from a friend than an email from an automated mailer, and I'm pretty accustomed to getting system-generated mail from mefi on a daily basis.

If you can't in some given scenario be arsed to copy and paste and track down an email address, what is this thing that's worth sending but not worth fifteen seconds, neh?
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:19 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

I like that it's not built in.

However, I have surprised myself by using the "Send to Gmail" widget in the Google firefox toolbar from time to time.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 6:22 AM on December 27, 2007

now I have to open a tab with Gmail, log in, etc.

If you can't be bothered to do all that, then it must not be a cool link, huh? Either that or ogin once and stay logged in to make these notifications easier.

Anything that prevents people from having a knee jerk, "omg, i have something on my mind, you have to know about it RIGHT NOW, it's so very, very important" reaction is a good thing.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:26 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

I also like that it's not built in. But I'm the geek that copies the URL and writes an email even when I'm sending something that has a "Send this article to a friend" button. It's just more personal and less spammy.
posted by bassjump at 6:28 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

*Clicks asinine whinefest button, waits*
posted by SassHat at 6:36 AM on December 27, 2007

I think this would be a good feature and would appreciate and make use of its inclusion on all parts of the site, especially the blue and green.

*Runs, ducks for cover*
posted by sneakin at 6:48 AM on December 27, 2007

Bad idea.
posted by languagehat at 7:01 AM on December 27, 2007

I've always considered those send links to be the suspicious bit of paper stuck to the toilet seat of a website. Not to mention that people can (and do) put in fake from addresses and spammy contents. Do we really want to be getting "Check out this MeFi link! It reminded me of this really cheap p3n15 3nLARG3m3nt product which I happen to be selling at somelink!!!11!! BUY NOW!!!" ?
posted by anaelith at 7:06 AM on December 27, 2007

jessamyn: I'm not sure there's anything sexer than cut n' paste
I just got the new cut and paste swimsuit calendar and let me just say hubba hubba and va va va voom!

And I also hate those "send to a friend" buttons. I forward lots of links/articles and l prefer the personal touch of an email. Usually I just send a key snippet or two of the article with a link to the whole thing and a brief note/comment explaining what I'm sending and why. I seldom if ever actually read the links that come from those "Send this article to a friend" buttons - and never if they didn't at least include a comment.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 7:11 AM on December 27, 2007

Lazy idea. I like actual emails too, even if it only consists of 'hey, I saw something cool I thought you'd like, how's yer infected sinuses? *insert link here*'

Forwards from websites almost invariably get deleted.
posted by h00py at 7:11 AM on December 27, 2007

You could always subscribe to mefi in something like google reader and then use their send this post function.
posted by drezdn at 7:14 AM on December 27, 2007

Why do we want something else that demeans MeFi even further to the level of the - *shudder* - other sites on the internet?

No, seriously, my mom sends me links like that all the time, and they just piss me off. Partly because I have zero interest in the things she sends, but mostly because it exacerbates the impersonal communication style she has adopted in recent years. What's wrong with a personal email?
posted by Phire at 7:26 AM on December 27, 2007

I think the less traffic we drive to the site the happier I'll be.

Cuz I am an exclusionary elitist asshole.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 7:33 AM on December 27, 2007

As a person that has no friends, I find this suggestion highly offensive.
posted by birdherder at 7:35 AM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

<a href="mailto:?subject=The FPP title">Email This!</a>

No email collecting, and you get to use your own email app.
posted by blue_beetle at 7:38 AM on December 27, 2007

What everyone else said. I've never, ever used one of those "send to a friend" things, preferring email instead and it seems to have worked fine for the past decade so I think we'll stick to it.

If you're wanting a feature to highlight good/funny posts that's not as invasive as sending a friend email about it (or MeFi mail), check out the contacts activity page once in a while. If you've got a couple dozen contacts, you'll probably find 2 or 3 interesting posts that they contributed a best answer to or garnered a ton of favorites each day.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:38 AM on December 27, 2007

I hate those links, because invariably I accidentally click on them and all of a sudden I'm sitting there while something is loading and wouldn't you know it, it's outlook, which I can't stand.

Please don't put those "Email This!" links up. It's not really that hard to copy and paste something into an email. More links = more clutter and for what, really?
posted by cashman at 7:40 AM on December 27, 2007

Even worse than the idea is the "YaddayaddaFilter:" presentation.
posted by breezeway at 8:15 AM on December 27, 2007

Considering there are lots of perfect alternatives in this thread, and Matt and pb have their hands full with features that don't have existing solutions, I think this is unlikely to happen. Here, I'll summarize them for you:

• Copy and paste into an email.
• Copy and paste into a mefi mail.
• Copy and paste into an IM.
• Right click -> "Send Link..." (Even on a permalink) (in Firefox)
• File -> Send -> "Link by Email" (in IE)
posted by Plutor at 8:33 AM on December 27, 2007

I like this idea.
posted by seanyboy at 9:05 AM on December 27, 2007

I for one quite like this asinine metatalk whinefest question.

What?
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 9:12 AM on December 27, 2007

I'd like it better if we didn't do this at all, but if we must, I vastly prefer blue_beetle's suggestion and have it just be an email href. It keeps it personal while still allowing for the convenience of not needing to cut and paste it. (Not that cutting or pasting is all that difficult or anything).

Besides, since everyone in the world that I care to talk to already exists on MeFi, I'll just use Mefi Mail.
posted by quin at 9:27 AM on December 27, 2007

Well, my next idea was to have flashing lights similar to Woot's when a MetaTalk thread turns into a flameout.
posted by desjardins at 9:29 AM on December 27, 2007

I always thought those "send this to a friend" links were email address harvesters. After all if I wanted to send the article to a friend it's just a copy and paste away.
posted by splice at 9:30 AM on December 27, 2007

Nooooo!!! I like the cut&paste&email method, both on the sending and receiving ends. Please don't change!
posted by rtha at 9:36 AM on December 27, 2007

A link or button that enables us to easily tell our friends "Hey, check out this really cool FPP/asinine question/metatalk whinefest!"

A link could never do it as well as you do, desjardins.

be sexier

...no.
posted by carsonb at 9:56 AM on December 27, 2007

I'm with cashman. blue-beetle's suggestion is all sorts of 1990's horrible backwardsness...es.
posted by nomisxid at 10:21 AM on December 27, 2007

Safari offers "Mail Link to this Page" as well. I don't think we need a feature that the the main browsers have offered for years for those who can't be arsed to copy/paste.

What is next? Add a Digg This! button to each post?
posted by birdherder at 10:57 AM on December 27, 2007

+
posted by empath at 11:05 AM on December 27, 2007

Safari offers "Mail Link to this Page" as well.

Holy crap, I never noticed that. Thanks! Learn sumpin' new every day....
posted by spilon at 11:31 AM on December 27, 2007

I like the Idea as long as it doesn't use my email client.
posted by Megafly at 11:32 AM on December 27, 2007

I could get behind this if desjardins' email (real, not mefi-) address was hardcoded into the to: field, so he'd get a copy of each and every email 'sent to a friend'.
posted by signal at 11:40 AM on December 27, 2007

I'm pretty sure desjardins is a she.
posted by languagehat at 11:48 AM on December 27, 2007

s e n d i t t o a f r i e n d !
posted by soundofsuburbia at 11:51 AM on December 27, 2007

I know you were all awaiting my input before closing the thread, so here it is.

I don't like the "email to a friend" links on webpages, and I don't like receiving them, for rthe easons others have already stated.

Also, in your email program you don't have to "look up" an address. You just start typing and it fills it in. Unless you are on, say, a Timex/Sinclair 1000. The "send this to" option on a web page actually requires more work, because you have to type in the whole address, and if you don't know it, you do have to look it up and paste it into the appropriate field.

I have spoken.
posted by The Deej at 11:55 AM on December 27, 2007

I like, soundsofsuburbia... but it'll mean extra work fot Mathowie...
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:59 AM on December 27, 2007

I hate this idea. In fact, I think we should go back to basics and have Metafilter only work on Lynx running over unix shell accounts. Weed out the riff raff.
posted by Justinian at 12:04 PM on December 27, 2007

NO DIGG
posted by blasdelf at 12:29 PM on December 27, 2007

Isn't mom worth the extra effort of cutting and pasting?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:33 PM on December 27, 2007

But wouldn't that mean extra work fot desjardins?
posted by cashman at 12:42 PM on December 27, 2007

Just fot the sake of argument, don't most browsers have an "email this link" button specifically fot this kind of thing?
posted by The Deej at 12:59 PM on December 27, 2007

But it's not built into Metafilter and therefore not sexy.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:07 PM on December 27, 2007

Therefote, sir.
posted by cortex (staff) at 1:17 PM on December 27, 2007

But wherefote quonsar?

future generations researching the 'early days' of Internetic Communication will never be able to decipher MetaTalk...
posted by wendell at 2:09 PM on December 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

Best not to have it. It's just begging for your site to be used by spammers. Then you have to add captchas and have opt-out lists... it's a big pain in the ass. Not rocket science either, however.

I joined metafilter because I want to know things that other people don't know. If I tell them as soon as I see it, I'll be a lot less entertaining at parties.

Also, just what is metafilter's privacy policy?!
posted by jeffamaphone at 2:17 PM on December 27, 2007

Next time someone suggests a feature, I propose we remove one.

I would like nothing but text and a box.
posted by blacklite at 4:32 PM on December 27, 2007

What jeffamaphone said.
We need to be brainstorming ways to make the site less visible, not more.
How about the whole site is rendered in rot13, and you need a greasemonkey script just to read the damn thing?
That would help with the whole first-page-of-google-results problem.
posted by signal at 4:47 PM on December 27, 2007

Wherefote, indeed.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 6:14 PM on December 27, 2007

I don't think jessamyn is an outlier for this sort of thing.
posted by flabdablet at 10:36 PM on December 27, 2007

I'm with you blacklite. I tried to get some PM's I worked with to do the same thing, but they were having none of it.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:39 PM on December 27, 2007

Just a suggestion: Your mom probably uses an email client that supports RSS feeds. Get a Tumblr account and put the "Share on Tumblr" bookmarklet on your browser toolbar. Then, when you see a cool Metafilter post you want to share with mom, just click "Share on Tumblr" and your mom will get a message in her RSS inbox.

Your mom could use her web browser as a feed reader instead.

(Also, I can't be arsed to look it up, but I'm sure there are web-based feed readers that will email RSS entries to you.)

Signal, why stop at ROT13? Why not create a proprietary extension to HTTP and require a proprietary browser you can only download after becoming a member?
posted by sdodd at 10:49 PM on December 27, 2007

And now that you've got me thinking about it, an opt-in public RSS feed for each MeFi-er's Favorites would enable Mugshot users to automagically broadcast their favorite MeFi posts to their friends with just one click. (Mugshot's support for del.icio.us works the same way, and Mugshot has built-in support for RSS feeds.)
posted by sdodd at 10:55 PM on December 27, 2007

Metafilter: I'm so glad that "I, for one, welcome our new ____ overlords" thing and the "1. ____ 2. ? 3. Profit!" thing seem to have slithered off into the sunset.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:52 AM on December 28, 2007

You insentive clod(s). I have no friends.
posted by oxford blue at 4:56 AM on December 28, 2007

blacklite: "I would like nothing but text and a box."

You can do this yourself. Step 1, cut a hole in the box.
posted by Plutor at 6:20 AM on December 28, 2007

Step 2, put your text in a box.
Step 3, ???
Step 4, Rollin' like JT all futuresexycoolbackhair
posted by carsonb at 7:34 AM on December 28, 2007

BitterOldPunk:
Me too.
posted by ExclusionaryElitistAsshole at 12:13 PM on December 29, 2007

Five dollars well spent. But whose sockpuppet is this? So many suspects (including myself, but I hope this comment gets me off the list).
posted by wendell at 5:12 PM on December 29, 2007

Cool. I inspired a sockpuppet. I feel somehow validated.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 12:10 PM on December 30, 2007