This morning I completed my Second Gear App Trilogy with the release of Shareables. Shareables is a small application that I have wanted on my iPhone for a while.
I am a habitual link sharer on Twitter and Facebook. I often find links in Twitter and just re-post them which is easy. There are also those times, however, when someone will email me a link or I find it while surfing around the Web in MobileSafari. In those cases, sharing URLs has never been too easy.
- The URLs are usually really long and crufty. Take a look at an article URL on ESPN.com. It’s chaos.
- Unless you’re using a Twitter app, there’s no way to shrink these long crufty URLs.
- Facebook’s app lets you paste a URL in their app, but it doesn’t create a link-style status update. As a semantics nerd, it drove me nuts.
- I often send links to friends & family members over text messages. The long URLs are a bit unruly in a tiny text message.
Those four things were the things I wanted to make less painful in Shareables.
The Challenges
I’ve been talking and demoing Shareables at 360iDev this week and I am telling people that it will either be a hit or a massive flop. I think the application is useful and I use it daily, but I don’t know how many other people are habitual link sharers like me.
My biggest concern is that setting up the Shareables bookmarklet is a challenge. Marco has blogged about the challenges of installing bookmarklets on the phone, and with Shareables I’m going to be hitting those headaches as well. It’s a major pain point.
Why Free?
I am not a fan of free applications, but I made Shareables free. Why? It’s an experiment.
Part of Shareables’ appeal is that it has a defined URL scheme that I am hoping other applications will add support for. While I was developing it, I always had it in the back of my mind that having a “Send to Shareables” button in Instapaper would be awesome. If the application is free and gains a lot of users, I think that makes something like that possible.
Beyond gaining users easily, I wanted to play with an ad supported application. I don’t have any plans to do an ad supported version of Elements or my Mac applications, but with this new application I’m willing to see what kind of return I can get on it.
It also is giving me the opportunity to toy around with In-App Purchases. Out of the box Shareables uses iAds and supports Facebook and Twitter for its sharing services. I’m hoping to add in-app purchases to disable ads as well as for other sharing services.
If you haven’t downloaded Shareables yet, it’s free on the App Store. Give it a whirl.