In their continuing effort to generate traffic (and thereby generate revenue), a number of sites have added what I have dubbed "social bars" to their interfaces. They usually peek up at the bottom of the page, and have a variety of tools to allow users to more easily share stories with their friends through Twitter, Facebook or other social networks. (See, for instance, the newly added social toolbar at All Things Digital, that protuberance at the bottom of every page.) If the title of the post didn't give it away, I find these toolbars more of a distraction and an annoyance than useful.

First off, it's not as if one needs a computer science degree to know how to share a webpage with one's social network. I find it hard to believe these social toolbars lower the cost of sharing stories sufficiently — as compared to the copy-paste-post method — to really make that much of a difference to traffic. Unless a user visits a site frequently, it's probably quick to copy and paste the URL into Twitter instead of going through the rigamarole of authorizing the site to connect to Twitter and "automatically" share the story.

Further, I suspect most of the sites that have these toolbars have visitors with high levels of computer literacy. Among the sites I visit regularly, this is certainly the case. For instance, neither The New York Times nor Le Monde, two general interest sites, have added such a feature. But CNet and All Things Digital, two sites with a definite tech bent, have added social bars. (I considered testing this theory with a random sample, but that seemed like overkill.) Which makes me think these toolbars do virtually nothing to make sharing easier. On the other hand, their presence might induce people to share stories more often than they otherwise would. So I could see how social toolbars do result in a net gain in traffic.

Most of these social toolbars are also ugly and buggy. I had to reload one page three times before its social bar would so much as respond to my clicks, much less automatically repost a story to Facebook. And most of the ones I've encountered make it impossible to completely eliminate their presence, encouraging me to read stories with Readability or Instapaper, which deprives the sites of analytic data and advertising revenue.

When I first came across one of these toolbars, I hoped they were a flash in the pan. But my intuition tells me I may need to find a way to cope. The Meebo Bar I mentioned earlier makes it a cinch for the millions of WordPress bloggers to add the feature, and I have to think Facebook has something similar cooking in their labs. And, since they apparently drive more traffic to sites than repel interface snobs, sites have every incentive to add them. Yet again, the lowest common denominator ruins it for the rest of us.