Social media services like Digg, Facebook and Stumbleupon are all about the social media bar:
Basically, all it does is embed the page being viewed in an iframe on a page that’s still hosted at the linking site. There’s a bit of a brouhaha being raised about this over concerns that it amounts to content hijacking. Sites that get linked to in this fashion no longer get any of the linking site’s “link juice” because the URL of the actual link is still at the linking site.
The whole thing is an interesting response to the overabundance of link shorteners out there. As a quick aside – why are there so many link shorteners? It’s like a fools’ gold rush right now – it seems everyone’s trying to whip one up and hope theirs will catch fire. Monetizing link shorteners seems more dubious than monetizing Twitter – the very service that gives all these shorteners livelihood. Weird.
Anyway, I find see validity in social networks employing this social media bar technique but I also see why it’s annoying. If you want to bookmark the page, you’ll have to remove the bar first, and if you click on a link within the site being linked to, that pesky bar stays on top. That crap is annoying.
Rather than leaving it in the hands of the social media or waiting for new standards to emerge that allow me to dictate whether or not these bars show up on my site, I’m blocking these bars using some old school JavaScript:
if (window.parent.frames.length > 0) window.parent.location = window.location
Bang. Problem solved (At least, in Safari, Firefox and IE7, so far). Doesn’t solve any of the “link juice” problems being debated, but it keeps those annoying bars off my page should someone links to them from a social media site.
Chatter