Few bloggers asked me this question and I thought it is important to clarify the difference between social bookmarking tools like ShareThis or AddThis and Tell-a-Friend. Here are 3 main ones:

1. Tell-a-Friend is for personal, 1-1 communication. As a visitor, if I think the page is interesting to a friend, I send a message on a personal channel like email, IM, twitter. Social bookmarking is more like “I like this so I bookmark, anyone else who uses same tags can see it also”. This would be a broadcast of my interest, rather than telling another friend why he/she might be interested in this content.

2. ShareThis also provides send the link by email, but that is no different from the typical email-the-link form. The biggest problem is, expecting users to remember personal email addresses on yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc. Instead, Tell-a-Friend lets them view their address book on all these providers and pick the friends to send the message. That way, Tell-a-Friend keeps the visitor’s focus on your site while they tell others. Anytime they have to go to a different page, for getting email addresses or to login to Facebook, they are likely to get distracted and something else may take the attention away from your site.

3. Message customization is the other difference. You get to customize the message template for each channel. That way you can help your visitors send the right message describing your content. They can of course modify or add their personal note about why they think their friend should see this content.

Tell-a-Friend and Bookmarking widgets can both be placed together, as they serve different purposes; just like you see on this blog.