The problem that comes before this one is whether share is a well-understood action.
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.
Yes a core feature of digital technology is copying it underlies everything. It takes extra effort to 'simulate' not copying i.e. collaboration, and that's why shared document collaboration like google docs etc. has really only showed up recently.
I agree with what you are saying. Read my comment below.
Expanding on that, and with the clear examples you gave, maybe the thing is that traditional or classic icons pictures the channel where the information was traveling and not the action itself.
A fax icon implies sending a document because everyone knows that a fax can only send documents. So the icon is representing the channel.
Same for the envelope icon with email (or even snail mail). It pictures the channel, not the action.
If you see a group of icons, one with the Facebook icon, one with Reddit's, one with Slashdot's, etc, you automatically know that it has to do with that particular channel, even if the action per se might not be clear enough, e.g. if I click the Facebook icon, what action am I taking? am I uploading/sending/sharing/pasting/chatting/emailing?
I don't care, I only care that the channel is the correct one. The service that administers that channel is the responsible one for doing what the user expects.
So maybe a fundamental flaw, like you say, is that different actions represent different channels but we are trying to put actions AND channels under a single umbrella, then there's no surprise that you can find lots of edge cases where the idea doesn't apply.
Perhaps its more logical to refer to all of these types of action as "broadcast" rather than "share" actions. You are "broadcasting" a picture to facebook, or a link to the file via twitter, or the actual file via email. By referring to these actions as broadcast rather than share actions, you convey to the user that they are relinquishing power over that data, once the genie is out, you are not stuffing him back in. A good icon would be a radio antenna broadcasting things. Just a thought.
Unfortunately, that icon has been strongly associated in most people's minds with subscribing to someone else's broadcast!... (the RSS feed icon, a very successful icon, even if most people have no clue what RSS actually means)
Yep, they are. It's impossible to share digital data without making a copy that is not under your control. There are some difference in write permissions, but people also do understand those.
If you e-mail a document then you make a copy of it at that instant, but if you send a link then it is updated as the original is updated and the copy is made not when it's sent but when it's received, which I'd consider to be two very different things.
"Sharing" with a group of people like in Facebook (where each one can essentially change the nature of the thing in real time by commenting on it or liking it) is also somewhat distinct from the other two because it makes a send-time copy that can be changed (in limited ways) by people other than you in possibly unpredictable ways.
The problem is that share as a verb is a bad metaphor for resources that can be replicated without limit; publish (or send, broadcast) is the right metaphor for that process when seen as an instant, one-off action.
Now shareD as a state is how the metaphor makes sense, for content stored at a common resource where one can take it back later, like your profile on a social network. So a better use that would hold the right nuances would be:
- Publish for making copies of the content and sending them to channels where one doesn't have control.
- Shared / Private for the status of content on channels on which you keep control to change that status.
Unfortunately, the needs of social sites (that try to make as much shared information as possible, and avoid people to withdraw it) have promoted the current confusing usage and spoiled it for all.
I think you are over thinking this a little. If you take "share" as a blanket term for "make this file accessible to others in some form" then it is clear why all of these actions should be grouped together, even if their details and implementation are quite different. That is why I think the ios icon is not so problematic, because "share" in this sense is a generalisation of uploading. You are not necessarily sending the data to a server in the traditional sense, but you are transmitting it to another party in some form.
I'd add the "share" by "copying an url into the clipboard" (that even requires the user to manually go to another app and paste the url to actually share) which is a really common practice to avoid supporting millions of share methods.
I think "send" vs. "share" is a good point. Email/SMS/DM/IM all have a recipient - they're messages that are sent.
A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared.
Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users.
I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the right idea - but Apple's "out of box" icon is too vague, obviously because of Apple's need to keep icons elegantly simple. I'd go for a bit more complexity:
An arrow pointing at a globe. When you share something, you share with the internet. MS Office used globes to represent the Web - like a chain+globe for a hyperlink and whatnot. Use that - an arrow at the globe implies you're sending something to the Internet (and generally a public or semi-public place on the Web specifically).
On iOS, the icon has even more meanings than that. The system share menu has three distinct sections. The first is AirDrop, to share a copy with a nearby device. The second is exporting to external apps and social networks (this can happen in many ways, as you described). And the third is to perform actions on the file within the app.
(The second and third sections are what can now be extended by developers in iOS 8.)
Well, I don't know about that. Some concepts are just abstract and don't have a distinct pictorial representation. For example, "save" is a pretty simple and easily understood concept but the best icon we have is at this point comically antiquated, and it offers zero clues to the uninitiated. But we haven't found anything that more fundamentally represents the concept.
Which I think is actually kind of ok, because again not everything has a simple obvious icon. Some things might be better served with just standardizing on an abstract and distinct shape. Newcomers may not know what a floppy disk is but they will learn the association anyway. And it just becomes one of those cool bits of lore that nerds like, double win!
The disk is the physical object (noun) though. While 'save' isn't tangible, what you are saving to (a disk somewhere) is, which makes it real and easy to understand. When floppy disks truly disappear the icon will have to change. 'Share' might be about people but there's 1000 ways to interact with people, so you need to actually describe better what you are sending to people (a link, permanent access, everything you own, or what?).
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.