It’s now accepted wisdom that no application is an island, and data just wants to be free. So, an important consideration in creating your product is how your users will use it to share. Being able to easily get information out of your application and shared with other people is an important element in your user’s satisfaction. It’s also critically important to your software business. Why? Because word of mouth will be your most important form of marketing and nothing is a better conversation starter than, “How’d you do that?”.

Instead of thinking of ways you can lock users into your application, think of ways you can empower your users to create valuable information and then quickly share it out to the world along the paths that they already use to share and communicate. You’ll be amazed at how fast word of your application will spread when the results of using your application spread. Just don’t jump to any quick conclusions about what information your users might want to share, how they may want to share it, or what format it needs to take to be shareable. Your instincts, which are based on your own sharing habits, may be wrong.

The fallibility of our own biases hit home to me after seeing the Silicon Alley chart of the day from July 21, 2009 about How People Share Content on the Web. Always the early adopter, I consider myself an accomplished digital collaborator, but I’m starting to worry that I may be getting set in some of my ways. I live in an instant messaging client (my kids get a kick out of that one, I might as well be driving a buggy), and I was fairly early to Twitter but the Facebook phenomena has almost completely passed me by. Yes, I have a blank Facebook page, and I answer friend requests that hit my email inbox, but that’s about it for Facebook and me. I’ve had customers request that I get a fan page… but I have to admit that I was fairly fuzzy on what that is until I read about Balsamiq’s fan page.

Until seeing that chart, I would’ve judged myself very competent to design most any application’s sharing approach, but I find some of the results from Silicon Alley chart surprising. Facebook is preferred to email by these users? Really? Obviously the details of the chart will change dramatically based on the demographic of your product, but that’s rather the point. It’s no longer an email, instant messaging and blog world. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, SMS are all the dominant means of sharing for certain groups of users. How homogenous are your users in how they share? And how like you are they? How homogenous are their computing environments? Is Apple’s Sync Services really an option for anything anymore?

Consider even the seemingly simple question of what information from your application your users may want to share. Think you can answer that quickly and without a second thought? If so, let me ask you, have you made an assumption about who they are sharing with? Users probably want to share even the most seemingly private data (passwords, financial records, diary entries) with themselves on different computers. They might want to share certain things with their spouses and family. Can you assume they are on the same local network? Finally each generation and demographic group seems to have quite different ideas about what they want to share with friends and colleagues and publicly with the rest of the world via the Internet.

Then there is the seemingly harder question of the format of the data. Years ago, the answer to shared data formats seemed to be getting easier. Just use XML for data and PDF for published data. No matter how complex, obscure or obtuse your data, put it in XML and provide an option to publish it to PDF, and then you can check the box. Interoperability was solved.

Experience showed this was all very naive (Office Open XML anyone?) Having data in XML only solved a small portion of interoperability issues and it turns out users universally hate PDF files on the Web. Eventually a backlash against complex and wordy XML data formats and cumbersome PDF documents gave us a return to plain text, comma separated values, various micro-formats and new text formats like JSON and YaML. A whole academic sect even took off on a trip to embed data directly in Web pages. I think they call it The Semantic Web. Rumor is that their ship got beached somewhere just off the Isle of RDF.

These questions about sharing are not independent either. What is being shared, the data format and the means of sharing are inextricably intertwined. PDF’s made great email attachments and XML is a great file format to share between applications, but have you texted any XML lately from your iPhone? See many PDF’s on Facebook these days?

So what’s a beleaguered Mac or iPhone developer to do? Which integrations do you target for your application? What format should you export data in? What’s private and what’s shared? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but don’t assume that you do either. What you prefer to share and how you prefer to share it is not necessarily the same for your users. You’ve probably been living in a connected world longer than your users and you may be set in some of your ways. Or your application’s user demographic may or may not follow the general trends and be using the same new fangled means of communication that seem so natural to you. (Don’t forget about sharing via the printer and paper! That one didn’t occur to you, did it?)

I’ll wrap this up with some simple advice. Don’t make assumptions about this very important set of features. Ask! Get a dialogue going with your users (or your market if you’re creating a new application) about information sharing and find out what they want to share, where they want to share it, and what format it needs to be in to make that easy for them. Make it easy to get data out of your application and out into the world and I guarantee you’ll be rewarded with new users from the most inexpensive and organic advertising you’ll ever get.

Sean Johnson is the author of Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours and is a seasoned product designer, developer and the President of Snooty Monkey, LLC, a Mac and iPhone development consultancy and the creators of BubbleTimer. If you’d like to consider Snooty Monkey for development work, please contact Sean at sean at snootymonkey dot com.