First, there are too many of them! 1,000+ results for the term “share” on the WP plug-in site.

I just tried out about 8 of them for this blog and for a client’s blog. In the past I used to put the developer code in myself, but that seemed too tedious.

• AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget
• Digg Digg
• Share This
• Jet Pack

and four others I’ve already deleted and forgotten about:)

For this blog I am temporarily using WP’s Jet Pack as I’m curious how the WordPress.com stats compare to google analytics. I only chose 3 icons (FBlike, twitter & g+) so out of the box it doesn’t look so hot when you rollover, as there are spaces missing. I’ll wait to see if I keep it before I customize the css.

For the client’s site, Jet Pack  feels a bit overkill at the moment. I liked AddThis, but didn’t like the way it added it’s own promo when you tweeted something. I found Digg Digg not so nice to configure. I ended up choosing Share This for the client’s site as I found it simple enough, effective and clean. A little bit of tweaking was necessary that involves “code” eg: you can’t select which icons you want to have – you need to manually type : fblike,twitter,plusone  . So it’s not super intuitive. But it’s simple and seems good enough for now.