You’ve come across a really useful website or found an interesting news story, and you want to quickly and easily share it via your social network, email or some other medium. You could of course open a new tab, log into your network and then copy and paste the URL, but that takes time. Some sites simplify matters by providing shortcut buttons to allow you to quickly share content, but it’s not guaranteed and even then your particular choice may not be covered.

Imagine, then, an extension for Chrome that basically gives you these shortcuts for any web page – it doesn’t matter where you are, clicking the appropriate button allows you to quickly and easily share the page in question with whichever network or person you want. Good, isn’t it? Now stop imagining: that extension exists, in the form of Shareaholic, which can also be downloaded for other major browsers too.

Installation is simple, and then you’re invited to click a button to set your favourite services from the dozens offered, broken into the following categories: social networking, instant messaging, URL shorteners, email, bookmarking, blogging, social news, tumblelogs and the final catch-all category, tools. Just click the ones you use and they’ll appear whenever you click the Shareaholic button in your toolbar.

You’ll need to set up a free account to get the most from the service – at present you can only directly connect with Facebook, but Twitter and Google Buzz are “coming soon”, and so long as you're already logged in through Chrome you'll find the sharing service works brilliantly.