Two recent events inspired this post.

The first is a Ted video featuring Clay Shirky. (Clay Shirky: How the Internet will (one day) transform government)

The second was a post by Andy Servovitz. (How to waste a viral lead-generation opportunity)

During my daily reading, I saw a Clay Shirky video embedded on a page. I was on my Android tablet at the time. I enjoyed the video and wanted to post a link to it on Facebook. It was a little too far of topic to appear here, but was still definitely worth sharing. There are any number of ways to share the link but the method I prefer is to get the direct link to the video rather than the page it was on.

This was a YouTube video and, like all of their videos, it has a share button in the player. I clicked that and it opened an input field with the URL selected ready for it to be copied. (See the image above.) Remember I am on an Android tablet. The usual method is tap and hold until the browser opens up an overlay with a copy option. In my situation, the tap and hold method only activated the touch screen keyboard. With no Control key, the option to use Ctl-C to do the copy does not exist. There may be other methods, but I don’t know them. Frustrated, I bookmarked the page it was on with the intention of sharing it the next day. That didn’t happen.

So now it’s a week or more later and I read Andy Sernovitz “How to waste a viral lead-opportunity”. He encountered a similar situation, except he was limited by the hardware, but there was no share options available. This succinct quote sums up the situation - “What a lost opportunity.” I couldn’t agree more.

In the Shirky video case the limitation is either mine, my tablet, or YouTube. While I may have overlooked an alternative method, I still think the method I tried should have been available to me. So it seems probable there is a failing somewhere between the tablet and YouTube. This won’t be resolved soon is my expectation.

Being aware of the limitations of the technology we use to publish content gives us the chance to provide some other alternatives for sharing the content.

Have you experienced similar frustrations with your attempts to share? I would love to hear about them.

Related articles:

• Going mobile - one step at a time (part 2: the trouble with forms) (blog.midboh.com.au)
• Don’t make obstacles to being liked (blog.midboh.com.au)