Pet Peeve: Ow.ly links

I was going to say, YOU DICKHEAD: based on the fact that a ‘Pet Peeve’ of mine is dead links.

Please note, however: I didn’t say, ‘YOU DICKHEAD’ because you snuck in just in time and fixed the issue.

Okay, I just saw my first ow.ly link.

Firstly, it’s not a frame. Any decrease in loading speed you may be noticing is purely imagined (okay, maybe a few milliseconds are being lost as it queries for the date and rating). This is a similar technique to what Digg uses.

A 20 pixel bar at the top of the screen is far from invasive, really. If you REALLY hate it, it has a button to turn it off forever on your machine, so you will not see it, even if people use an ow.ly link.

Granted the ‘Tweet’ link probably isn’t really that useful considering you will usually have accessed the link via Twitter anyway, though some people (social media addicts) may find the “Share” button handy.

From Owly:

Interesting facts about ow.ly:

* 95% of users love the ow.ly bar’s utility. If they don’t, they can opt-out and never see the ow.ly toolbar again.
* Publishers benefit from the ow.ly social bar’s increased stickiness and sharing capabilities.
* Webmasters have reported a 100% improvement in traffic when their links are shared with the ow.ly social bar.
* Ow.ly is designed to let Google and search engine spiders through, so it won’t hurt your site’s SEO.

I chanced on this post while researching navigation toolbars like ow.ly as a possible UI platform for a new widget we’re developing (…for which BTW I’m looking for pilot partners: http://bit.ly/3q2MeK).

This direction looks initially very promising from the development and business point of view because you get much more presence at relatively little effort.
BUT, upon further research it seems the reality is that users despise these toolbars and find them highly annoying and invasive.

I’ve seen massive criticism of the Diggbar on Mashable and elsewhere (digg.com/tech_news/DIGG_Yet_Another_DiggBar_Update), Facebook’s share bar has evidently vanished from the face of the planet (although no one writes about it – which is weird in itself…), and this post certainly isn’t very supportive of the concept
; )

I’m just curious – are there other people out there like Jayphen who hold a dissenting view? Are there social bar fans out there who want to shed a different light on this issue?

Cheers,
Mike