Today I am revealing the last piece of the puzzle that makes up the fav.or.it jigsaw. In previous coverage I have gone over the many aspects in which fav.or.it helps you find new content, today I will cover how you can share the content you find with your friends and the wider internet.

User Types

When I looked at available solutions for content sharing they lacked several several key features which would help two distinct types of user. The first is the casual sharer, someone who does not want to maintain a long list of shared content but may want to on occasion inform others of something they have found.

The second is the power sharer, someone who actively searches through a range of content and picks out what they feel is the best and sticks it in a list which others may then view.

Simple Share

To the casual sharer we have added the ability with one-click to send a link for a post out to a range of external services. Many sites on the internet already allow you to click on a link which then takes you to that services to add it (which may then require you to login etc.) we wanted to remove these steps.

How have we done this? By the use of our identity management you can give us your details on a range of external sharing services (twitter, del.icio.us, etc). Once you have authenticated against any of these services (only once) an option appears in the share drop-down on every post that instantly adds that post to whichever service.

Libraries

For the power user we have added the concept of ‘libraries’. A library is simply a storage area in which any number of posts can be stored for sharing. Again within the share drop-down it displays the available library(s) in which you can store the currently viewed post.

The real power of libraries is linked directly with ’slices’, for a quick recap a slice is any combination of content within fav.or.it (filtered by tag, category, date, rank, owner, feed) – libraries take slices further by allowing you to take a library and slice it up. So for a quick example you could have stored 200 posts of various categories which you would like to share, but you would like to be able to share only those within the technology category. No problem! just add further filters to the slice that contains the library.

By slicing the library you are not losing any of the content you have added you are just filtering what is being display and in fact you can continue to add more content to it even if they do not match the filter. If you remove those filters later the other content will appear again. What else is unique is that you may use the same library across multiple slices and slice them differently. So going back to the original example of the 200 posts, you could create 3 different slices each that sliced that one library differently.

How to share

So how do I share these libraries? Just like any other slice we assign a persistent unique ID to every slice, this ID can be given to your friends (or published out to the internet).

• Your user profile can optionally display a list of the slices you are sharing
• Shared slices can be viewed as an RSS feed (e.g. http://fav.or.it/feed/rss/slice/4099)
• The ID can be entered into any of the fav.or.it search boxes to instantly take you to the specified content

Collaboration

The last but probably the most exciting concept in sharing in fav.or.it is the collaborative nature of slices. If you give out the ID to a slice which contains a library (and that library is marked as public) then that other user may also contribute to that library. There is no limit to how many users may collaborate on a single library and our hope is that people will quickly make new mini-libraries share them around so others can contribute to produce new and exciting lists of content.

An example of this behavior would be to create a new library (users also have no limit to the number of individual libraries they may create) called ‘barack obama’ – put in 5 posts about him and then hand it to friends to find other content related to it and then share it as a RSS feed on Digg. The life span may be quite short but after a month everyone can just delete that slice. (note: libraries only ever get deleted if everyone who has a reference to it deletes it)

It is also possible to create ‘private’ libraries, these can still be shared to other users but the original creator is the only person who may add any extra content.

Shortcut

As with other services we have shortcut keys to all of this functionality allowing one-key sharing. This can either be to send to twitter (don’t press it too much!) or to add to a particular library.

Launch

With this last bit of jigsaw fitted in we are very close to finally letting you all get your hands on fav.or.it – if you want get the very latest in the coming days of progress and the launch I will be twittering about it – follow me if you already use twitter.