Most of you will recognize the image at left, the share icon that has taken over the blog world. I forgot who came up with the icon, but (edit) Tom gave me the proper link. My first thought was, "Oh god. I hope it doesn't become popular." But it did, and now everyone has a horrible, non-semantic icon littering their blog or news source. (edit) Pre-iterating, I'm not knocking Alex King's icon, just the semantics.

When I say semantics in regards to images, I don't mean the semantics that some people think will save the Internet. What I mean is the nitpicking semantics, splitting hairs, and etcetera. The kind of nitpicking that every person on the planet does until they get paid money not to.

The current share icon amounts to little more than an open triangle with circles at the end points. The icon doesn't demonstrate the reality of Internet sharing. The circles, denoting people, in the original share icon are the same size, giving the impression that each user is as interested, or important as the others regarding the topic. Which is not the case in regards to anything, especially the Internet.

In my version of the icon (the second image), the seeder, the first top left circle, the person who felt the item was worth being shared with others is the most important, therefore the largest. From there the secondary person, the right most circle, may not be as interested in the shared item as the seeder, so that circle needs to be smaller to illustrate said possible disinterest. The last person, the bottom most circle, is potentially more interested in the shared item than the second person, therefore larger than the second circle, but not as large as the seeder. Furthermore, the third circle is closer to the second person, giving the impression that the second person passed the link on to the third person in less time than the first person shared the item with the second.

Our brains are incredibly sensitive to minute changes, in fact, we have to constantly work to ignore those small little details. Headphones, sunglasses, white nose generators, television, dim lights, bright lights, ear plugs, muscle relaxers, cocaine, sex, beer. When you think about it, our entires lives are in large parts devoted to weeding out things we don't want to give attention.

But I'm off topic, what I mean is that in the age of the bloated website where no over-the-top image is to be left out, why would we settle for a small, unrealistic icon that doesn't fully represent the idea of the Internet when all one must do is change the size of some circles?

Semantics in icons are generally only for standardized icons. For example, the RSS icon has good semantics, one source transmitting content in all directions. On the other hand, the Digg icon used in blogs is not a good semantic icon, but that doesn't matter, it is a stylized, widely-known icon and not subject to the rules of semantics.

Finally, I'm not trying to rag on the person that created the icon, he hit the nail on the head when he gave link-sharing a standardized icon. But now it is time to upgrade the icon to something better. The third image is what the icon looks at 16×16. And as you can see, the semantics isn't lost at that level either.