#Creating a 'Share on Google+' URL with this Dubious Clusterhack
Disclaimer: This is a ridiculous set of hacks. I had fun messing about with this and wanted to share it, but I wouldn't recommend using it for anything important. It may stop working at any time.
tl;dr: Google doesn't support sharing arbitrary URLs via a simple share link, but you can work around it by doing a redirect via Google, like so: https://plus.google.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2Fsearch%3FbtnI%3D1%26q%3Dshowstudio%26sourceid%3Dnavclient
Most social sites let you share a link by visiting a special URL, for example:
Twitter. http://twitter.com/home?status=http://showstudio.com
Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://showstudio.com
As far as I know, Google+ doesn't support this. There are some workarounds, several of which are noted at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6676658/share-link-on-google, but none of them seemed to work properly for me.
This one intrigued me though:
Yes, you can.
https://plus.google.com/share?url=YOUR_URL_HERE
Edit: It works only with eff.org.
Someone elsewhere noted that it also works for google.com, and I noticed it seemed to work for any google.com URL, not just the homepage.
So, to craft a google.com URL that redirects to the page you want to share. With a couple of URL parameters you can create an "I'm Feeling Lucky" link that redirects automatically:
http://google.com/search?q=showstudio&btnI=1&sourceid=navclient
URL encode this and pop it on the end of the share link noted above, and it should work:
The bonus is that it seems to actually resolve the redirect, so presents you with the actual title of your site, and allows you to select an image from it:
Obviously, this is presenting Google's top result for your query, so you'll need to be sure you'll come up first! Easy if you're trying to present a link to your homepage - harder if you want to present a specific subpage of your site. You could of course use extra search parameters like site:example.com or inurl:example.com/project/test_project to narrow it down a bit.
can we pass the names or ids of the people in the URL so that when the share window is opened on the browser then on the field to whom we mention the receivers name will be prefilled. is there any way to do that?