Link pain

This tip for website that want links passed on is very good.

Now, still with the Economist, here’s what not to do.

Reading the Economist on my iPad (disclaimer: I think that reading the Economist is one of the best things I do on my iPad) I found an article I wanted to share with my friends on Facebook.

So I clicked on the share button, choosing Facebook, and got this:

Now, I wanted to use the beginning of the article in my post. So I went back to copy it from the article but I couldn’t. For some reason that I’m sure is very good but I cannot even begin to imagine, copying text is disabled on the Economist app.

“I could copy this text from the web version” I thought, so I emailed to myself a notification about the message (email is another feature of the share button).

Checked my mail, found the link to the article, opened the article with Safari. But, for some other good reason I cannot imagine, Safari on iPad does not allow you to select a paragraph and a bit (what I wanted), it’s either just a part of a paragraph, or two full paragraphs.

So I copied the two paragraphs, pasted them to the Notes app, and copied the bit of text that I wanted.

At this point, back to the Economist app, “Share” again, and I was finally able to post it for my friends.

I’m convinced that this strategy prevents the less motivated readers from sharing content, which probably has a very positive impact on the quality of the readers.

Still…