If you like to share tidbits of quotes and other useful information from blog posts or websites, a Chrome extension called Micro Sharing will make this task easier for you. Micro Sharing lets you highlight any text from a web page and share it with over eighty social networks. Upon installation, you will notice the Micro Sharing icon on the top right corner of the browser. Make sure to hover your mouse over the icon to check if the extension is enabled.
From a web page of your choice, highlight the text that you want to share. You will notice a series of social network icons pop up near the highlighted portion.
Click on a social network of your choice. In the examples below, I chose to share the same highlighted text to Twitter, and then Facebook. For sharing to work, make sure you allow pop-ups for opening the authentication window for social networks like Twitter and Facebook. When sharing text to Twitter, remember that it shouldn’t exceed the 140 character limit.
You will notice that the highlighted text will be shared with a link to the original source of the text. You have the option to delete this if you don’t want to include it in your post. In Facebook, the text will be shared as a link and not just a status update. Just like sharing any other link, you can add your comment on top of the link before you post it to your timeline. To see a list of all social networks you can share to, right-click on the Microsharing icon and click “Options”.
Here, you’ll find a list of all social networks you can share, including less popular ones like Xing, Appnet and Plurk. You can also send highlighted text to any email address. In addition to sharing text, you can also share other content like photos and videos, but these would be shared as links to the original photo or video source. For instance, sharing a photo from Facebook to Twitter will only add the image or video URL to the post, and not the content itself. Micro sharing is great for sharing short, quotable quotes on social media that might even be shared by your followers. However, there seems to be less customization available on how text appears when shared. Also, it lacks the ability to credit the source of the text by including the direct URL of the website rather than using a custom URL shortener (in this extension’s case, it uses 4qu.co). Other than a few minor quirks, this extension is still valuable for quickly sharing short content across many social channels. If you like sharing what you read from your favorite blogs, then this extension can be a great tool for you to do that.
