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Sharing on social networks has become a very powerful tool to make your website popular and to boost its traffic. We have made it easy to allow people to share content on social networks and via email by creating the new RadSocialShare control for ASP.NET AJAX. The control will officially be available in the Q3 2011 release later this month, but you can test drive it now in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2011 BETA.

 

Main features:

 

  • Allows sharing the current page or a custom URL on different social networks.
    You can easily customize the sharing content – both the URL and title of the shared content are controlled by simple server properties.

  • Offers two types of sharing buttons – styled and standard third party buttons.
    You could use styled buttons (created by us and served from the web application):

    styled buttons

    or standard third party popular buttons as follows (created by the social networks and served by them):

    third party buttons
    third party buttons with counters
    The third party buttons such as Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 are implemented in XHTML compliant code and also allow easy configuration by using server properties.



  • Compact popup with filter capabilities to save space.
    Having too many sharing buttons can be confusing and also requires extra space. By using the compact popup you could show only a few of the most useful buttons and still provide other sharing options on demand. In addition, the popup has filtering for ease and convenience.
    popup
  • Easy  customization of the visual appearance of styled buttons.
    This could be easily achieved by setting server properties or CSS, both with sprite or with separate icons, depending on your preferences.
  • Tell a friend dialog and mailto: button for sending emails.
    Apart from the popular mailto: URL option which allows sending mail through an application installed on the user’s machine, RadSocialShare offers a Tell a friend feature with a custom dialog. This feature uses a callback to send the mail, and a CAPTCHA to prevent spam. All you need to do to enable it is to configure the desired SMTP server and a mail address from which the mail will be send.
    mail dialog
  • Full Google Analytics support.
    The RadSocialShare control offers full asynchronously implemented multi-tracker Google Analytics support which can be enabled by setting a single property to web property ID (also known as UA number). Having more than one RadSocialShare instance with the same UA is not a problem - all will be logged in the same tracker.
  • Last but not least, as part of the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX suite, RadSocialShare can be easily configured to be always visible on the page no matter if it is scrolled by simply being put in a controls container with such functionality – e.g.  RadNotification, RadWindow, or a RadToolTip control.

 

You can explore and play around with the control and its features in the online demos below:

http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax-beta/socialshare/examples/overview/defaultcs.aspx


About the Author

Iana Tsolova

is Product Manager at Telerik’s DevTools division. She joined the company back in the beginning of 2008 as a Support Officer and has since occupied various positions at Telerik, including Senior Support Officer, Team Lead at one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams and Technical Support Director. Iana’s main interests are web development, reading articles related to geography, wild nature and latest renewable energy technologies.

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