We are happy to announce a little big new project: Share Like Connect. To describe it in the clearest way possible, imagine the following scenario:
- You are browsing a web page, and you want to tweet a link to the funny web page you are visiting.
- You are viewing a slideshow of photos, you want to upload the currently open one to Flickr (or whatever other web service).
- You are viewing a PDF document, and you want to send it to somebody via e-mail.
- You want to remember that the file you are viewing right now is part of the current activity.
Until now all those operations were possible, but require an amount of extra work that shouldn't be needed, for instance opening a webbrowser, going to Flickr, then searching again on the hard drive for the photo you are viewing right now.
Share Like Connect is a new service that will be deeply integrated in the KDE platform (so, every application can use it) that gives a semantic machine readable meaning to the "thing" the user is viewing right now in the active application, may be a file, a contact, an e-mail, a URL or a geolocation. A global menu in the Plasma workspace shows possible actions for that resource, that will always have the same, familiar user interface, whatever the used application is.
The actions are of 3 categories, as the name says:
- Share: share the resource with somebody, such as send by e-mail, publish a microblog entry, upload photos on a web service.
- Like: liking something, for either sharing this information with my friends (such as Facebook like) or to remember about this thing in the future, such as rating with Nepomuk or saving a bookmark.
- Connect: give a relation between different things to organize better our own data: for instance connect the viewed resource with the current Activity, to always have in a more prominent place links to everything related to what i am doing with the machine right now: all the relevant files, contacts, applications...