The new WebShare API allows us to encourage users to share our content via social networks and chats from Android devices (and hopefully in future iOS).
We should show a button that allows sharing from the mobile site to encourage distribution of our content.
We can track number of shares by suffixing a parameter to all URLs e.g. ?mobileshare=1 to get a sense of how widely used it is.
Engineering effort involved is minimal - maybe 1 or 2 points.
This button has already been prototyped on https://trending.wmflabs.org
and is surfaced in the mobile web beta channel for testing and to gather feedback on whether it is useful/wanted.
- Motivations
- adding modern functionality
- helping people share more easily
- encourage dissemination of knowledge
- rid the world of Facebook like buttons by making people more aware of an open alternative
- closely lines up with our values (embracing web standards, decentralising web from big companies such as facebook)
Measurement
We can count share button clicks via statsv cheaply