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The reason I like Shareaholic’s Firefox plugin so much is because, well, it’s a browser plugin, and therefore it’s always going to be right in my face and totally simple to use.  Before I got the Shareaholic button, I had buttons from multiple web apps in my bookmarks toolbar (Delicious, TinyURL, Evernote, etc…).

Now Shareaholic has enabled my to consolidate all of them into one button, which is totally useful and convenient.  I simply land on a site or page that I want to share, click on the Shareaholic button and choose the service by which I want to share – it’s that easy.  Delicious, Twitter and StumbleUpon are probably the services I use most, so the ability to share on all of them from one place is totally useful.  The button isn’t just for Firefox either – they’ve seemingly covered all of the browser bases (besides Opera – but Chrome and Safari are there).

You can also select and deselect services to include in your Shareaholic button, and there are tons of services to choose from (some I honestly have never heard of).  If there’s a service that you use and it’s not on the list, you can ping them and they’ll likely try to add it.  The service appears to use some 3rd party software to make their functionality fly (twitthat for example to enable Tweets from their plugin).

It’s fairly unclear how the company will monetize its offering, though it appears that they do have a ‘freemium’ revenue model (per their terms of service) and offer paid upgrades for certain features.  I found it rather difficult to even find which of these features were upgradable actually, but maybe that’s coming later.  In any case, the service itself is great (i’m a devoted user after just a day or two of testing) – and the developers seem to be laser focused on getting as many users as possible, which is smart at this stage.  It certainly helped when the service was mentioned as an excellent add-in to IE 8 at the Mix08 Conference in Vegas.  It also helped that the service was the grand prize winner of Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest.  Check it out for yourself:

Here’s a video made by a user: