Thursday, July 19, 2012

Seamless Sharing

I uploaded an album yesterday of my recent trip to the ICME 2012 conference in Melbourne, Australia to Google+. I wanted to share a link to the album to Facebook, so I posted a link to the album. I was surprised that nothing popped up on Facebook for the preview, so I ran some experiments.

I created a public album on Google+, a public album on Facebook, and posted a public tweet with an image attached. I then shared each one on the other two social networks. I was surprised that the only one that actually showed content was sharing a tweet to Google+ and Facebook. Here's a grid showing all the results:

Comparison of sharing a photo/album across different social network. The rows are the source and the columns are the destination.
What's interesting is that other things do work. For example, I shared a link to a Flickr album, and it shows the content across all three networks. I'm guessing that maybe Facebook and Google+ don't have the proper Open Graph tags for the other networks to parse, but this really should be a seamless experience across networks.