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Leave Web Enough Alone!

Jeremy Zawodny is rightly torqued about the needless complication of tools that purport to help with information sharing. The web's always had that pretty well covered, thanks to the simple magic of the URL. Anything you find, you can bookmark, email, or with a tinyurl, disseminate on a cocktail napkin. If my dear grandfather had been born later, he probably would never have picked up the habit of mailing articles lovingly clipped with a pen knife, and instead would have referred me to his del.icio.us feed. Zawodny points to a bizarre assortment of pop-ups, forms, and other unwelcome surprises that result from the "helpful" new sharing features, and notes...
they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I'm too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it... Thanks for the confidence boost.
At Tizra, we're more inclined to say thanks to for the opportunity to do better. Our AgilePDF™, for example, gives every page of an online PDF its own URL, so that users can find them, bookmark them, and yes, share them just the way they would any other web pages. Call us uninventive, but sometimes it's better to exploit rather than fight the standards and user habits that have made the web the fastest growing medium in history.

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