When will we reach button overload?

We’ve known it was coming for a while now, but apparently Google’s +1 button is ready for wide release. Web surfers will now have another way to like, share, broadcast —whatever you want to call it— their web habits and interests to the universe.  The pace of adoption here will be fascinating to watch. Will this button be another useful tool for disseminating your school’s news and cool happenings or additional clutter on a web page?

Are any of you finding like +1 buttons and their ilk to be design issues? What’s your sense of how many of your web visitors are using them? In general, choice is a very good thing. However the other day I clicked on a “Share this” button and it gave me more than 250 options, most of which I’ve never heard off. The number of options were mind boggling.

Now granted, the strength of the Google brand name will give them a built in advantage in the race to share things with other people. But I’m curious if web users consider these  types of buttons useful or think they’re just noise. What percentage of them actually get used? Does anyone actually send something out or like a piece through say 50 services? And if that person does that, how fast are they ignored by their contacts?

What is the ideal number of “share” buttons? Somewhere out there, the happy medium lies. My gut tells me anything more than 6 starts to get annoying and 10 or more makes your page feel like this.

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