I think the modern icons are striving for a more abstract and minimalistic look. This seems to be the case for all 3 mobile OS covered. This is mostly about fashion, I guess, but an abstract icon does look less out of place in more situation. I can well imagine being slightly miffed about having to put a megaphone in my app to fit platform conventions, although I would gladly take it over that god-awful present icon WPOS7 apparently had.
What I like about the megaphone is that looks similar to what we are doing, shouting to whoever wants to hear.
When you think about sharing a milkshake, you have two people sharing an experience; when you think about the open hand, looks like you are expecting someone to show up to hand over something to him or maybe begging.
My feeling when I click share or retweet is like I am shooting to stars and the odds that my bullet get to a black hole are huge.
Upload and Share tend to be the same thing for most users. You want this on that. I don't think it's coincidence that the share icon looks like an upload icon in iOS7.
Completely agree. You can argue that sharing is uploading to another person. Obviously not downloading it.
This really isn't about sharing, its about sending the content outwards. The subsequent action will dictate whether its to share or pass to another program or even copying for a later paste.
Its sending the "thing" outwards...away from yourself. To something else.
I like the Y-shaped old Android logo, but for some reason I feel that it looks upside-down. Could be one dot on top, with 2-3 arrows pointing downwards.
It would be interesting to ask people if they recognise what the "Milkshake-icon" represents.. I don't think "A drink with two straws" would've been my first guess.
I think the Android icons are fine. The old one is a bit easier to understand due to the explicit arrow direction, but the new one is implicitly directed correctly for people who are trained to read left to right. It's abstract and consequently vague, but I don't think that's a big problem: I expect there to be a share functionality, and in that context the icon is easy enough to understand.
The new Apple icon is less abstract, but it does seem to scream upload/send to server, which is also a function I might expect in similar situations as a share function; I think the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer.
The Windows 8 one is fine, easily understandable in context for the same reasons as the new Android one, but it lacks any semblance of directionality. It's a bit hilarious that it's almost identical to the Ubuntu icon.
The other two are terrible and I probably wouldn't expect them to signify sharing even in a context where I'd expect the functionality.
Edit: Of course I am an Android user so this may just be (confirmation?) bias at work. :)
> the new one is implicitly directed correctly for people who are trained to read left to right. It's abstract and consequently vague, but I don't think that's a big problem: I expect there to be a share functionality, and in that context the icon is easy enough to understand.
I disagree. I think you're just rationalizing your own knowledge of what this means. And I say that because, as someone who's never used Android, I have literally never seen that icon before. And if I had seen it in a context other than a blog post about share icons, I would have had no idea whatsoever what it meant.
I think the Android icon (and the Windows icon) does convey the concept of "social network" and if this icon was exclusively used for FB/Twitter/Whatever, that would be appropriate.
But "share" is often used for emailing, or just marking a file as "public" in its existing storage.
> the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer
Except that every standard form of sharing involves uploading to a server – very few are actually handled in a peer-to-peer fashion (bluetooth sharing between adjacent devices is the exception, not the rule).
The odd part about the Android icons is that they imply "make public" or "send to multiple locations". Neither may be the case. Email to a single recipient is the likely common case. You might just be uploading to your personal network drive (no other users, just yourself).
I think you've touched on one big source of this problem, which is that many of these icons have been trademarked and saddled with all manner of usage restrictions and licenses.
As an entrepreneur or designer, am I going to waste who knows how much time interpreting the usage guidelines from Share This, or devote valuable space on my site to giving the Open Share people an attribution?
No. I'm going to spend 5 minutes designing something that won't cause future legal threats or trouble at acquisition time.
The thing about open source is that the way it is licensed means that anyone who has acquired the license before it is sold (such as Google's Android) can redistribute it as long as it follows the license requirements. As such, ANYONE can still use the Google's version of the three dots or if anyone had acquired a license to the original before it was no longer offered (pre 2012), can also relicense the work. Can any of the other share symbols be freely used?
what I don't like about the explosion of share menus us that email has been subordinated to the share menu. I may be a constituency of one, but email is the only way I share. So instead of tapping or clicking "email", I have to tap "share" then email.
The problem that comes before this one is whether share is a well-understood action.
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.
I agree with what you are saying. Read my comment below.
Expanding on that, and with the clear examples you gave, maybe the thing is that traditional or classic icons pictures the channel where the information was traveling and not the action itself.
A fax icon implies sending a document because everyone knows that a fax can only send documents. So the icon is representing the channel.
Same for the envelope icon with email (or even snail mail). It pictures the channel, not the action.
If you see a group of icons, one with the Facebook icon, one with Reddit's, one with Slashdot's, etc, you automatically know that it has to do with that particular channel, even if the action per se might not be clear enough, e.g. if I click the Facebook icon, what action am I taking? am I uploading/sending/sharing/pasting/chatting/emailing?
I don't care, I only care that the channel is the correct one. The service that administers that channel is the responsible one for doing what the user expects.
So maybe a fundamental flaw, like you say, is that different actions represent different channels but we are trying to put actions AND channels under a single umbrella, then there's no surprise that you can find lots of edge cases where the idea doesn't apply.
Yep, they are. It's impossible to share digital data without making a copy that is not under your control. There are some difference in write permissions, but people also do understand those.
If you e-mail a document then you make a copy of it at that instant, but if you send a link then it is updated as the original is updated and the copy is made not when it's sent but when it's received, which I'd consider to be two very different things.
"Sharing" with a group of people like in Facebook (where each one can essentially change the nature of the thing in real time by commenting on it or liking it) is also somewhat distinct from the other two because it makes a send-time copy that can be changed (in limited ways) by people other than you in possibly unpredictable ways.
The problem is that share as a verb is a bad metaphor for resources that can be replicated without limit; publish (or send, broadcast) is the right metaphor for that process when seen as an instant, one-off action.
Now shareD as a state is how the metaphor makes sense, for content stored at a common resource where one can take it back later, like your profile on a social network. So a better use that would hold the right nuances would be:
- Publish for making copies of the content and sending them to channels where one doesn't have control.
- Shared / Private for the status of content on channels on which you keep control to change that status.
Unfortunately, the needs of social sites (that try to make as much shared information as possible, and avoid people to withdraw it) have promoted the current confusing usage and spoiled it for all.
I'd add the "share" by "copying an url into the clipboard" (that even requires the user to manually go to another app and paste the url to actually share) which is a really common practice to avoid supporting millions of share methods.
I think "send" vs. "share" is a good point. Email/SMS/DM/IM all have a recipient - they're messages that are sent.
A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared.
Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users.
I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the right idea - but Apple's "out of box" icon is too vague, obviously because of Apple's need to keep icons elegantly simple. I'd go for a bit more complexity:
An arrow pointing at a globe. When you share something, you share with the internet. MS Office used globes to represent the Web - like a chain+globe for a hyperlink and whatnot. Use that - an arrow at the globe implies you're sending something to the Internet (and generally a public or semi-public place on the Web specifically).
Well, I don't know about that. Some concepts are just abstract and don't have a distinct pictorial representation. For example, "save" is a pretty simple and easily understood concept but the best icon we have is at this point comically antiquated, and it offers zero clues to the uninitiated. But we haven't found anything that more fundamentally represents the concept.
Which I think is actually kind of ok, because again not everything has a simple obvious icon. Some things might be better served with just standardizing on an abstract and distinct shape. Newcomers may not know what a floppy disk is but they will learn the association anyway. And it just becomes one of those cool bits of lore that nerds like, double win!
The disk is the physical object (noun) though. While 'save' isn't tangible, what you are saving to (a disk somewhere) is, which makes it real and easy to understand. When floppy disks truly disappear the icon will have to change. 'Share' might be about people but there's 1000 ways to interact with people, so you need to actually describe better what you are sending to people (a link, permanent access, everything you own, or what?).
Perhaps its more logical to refer to all of these types of action as "broadcast" rather than "share" actions. You are "broadcasting" a picture to facebook, or a link to the file via twitter, or the actual file via email. By referring to these actions as broadcast rather than share actions, you convey to the user that they are relinquishing power over that data, once the genie is out, you are not stuffing him back in. A good icon would be a radio antenna broadcasting things. Just a thought.
Unfortunately, that icon has been strongly associated in most people's minds with subscribing to someone else's broadcast!... (the RSS feed icon, a very successful icon, even if most people have no clue what RSS actually means)
Yes a core feature of digital technology is copying it underlies everything. It takes extra effort to 'simulate' not copying i.e. collaboration, and that's why shared document collaboration like google docs etc. has really only showed up recently.
On iOS, the icon has even more meanings than that. The system share menu has three distinct sections. The first is AirDrop, to share a copy with a nearby device. The second is exporting to external apps and social networks (this can happen in many ways, as you described). And the third is to perform actions on the file within the app.
(The second and third sections are what can now be extended by developers in iOS 8.)
I think you are over thinking this a little. If you take "share" as a blanket term for "make this file accessible to others in some form" then it is clear why all of these actions should be grouped together, even if their details and implementation are quite different. That is why I think the ios icon is not so problematic, because "share" in this sense is a generalisation of uploading. You are not necessarily sending the data to a server in the traditional sense, but you are transmitting it to another party in some form.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but after reading the Milkshake concept, I thought that maybe the problem is in the word "share" as the driving concept and not the icon per se.
In terms of the milkshake, that's the perfect icon. You actually share something when you stop having "a whole" and now you have "a part" but then someone else has "a part" as well. That's what I've seen parent teach their kids over and over again. Sharing the ball: we both use it, share your candy we both enjoy it, even if it means I'll have less.
With electronic articles and other media that gets shared, you actually share nothing in that sense, you just let someone know about it, whilst still keeping the whole yourself.
I know that semantically you can also "share information", and you lose nothing by doing it. But my point is that maybe most people associate sharing with "losing a bit to give to someone else" instead of just "letting know".
I am thinking hard and haven't come up with a better word, I admit it, but maybe there is actually a better word for describing that "electronic share" action?
The bullhorn looks promising, but like someone said, it looks like an axe is too small. And also someone else said it would have to be different enough from a volume icon.
Maybe two hands apart, one with a piece of "the whole" and the other hand with the other piece?
In that regard I liked the Android icon a lot, even though it's a bit too abstract. But it conveys the idea that you just multiplied the information, without losing anything yourself. Maybe a diagram of an "information bus" could work? like a straight horizontal line with a perpendicular line protuding from it, indicating that you keep going but still produced a new path/road/source?
> With electronic articles and other media that gets shared, you actually share nothing in that sense, you just let someone know about it, whilst still keeping the whole yourself.
What about thinking of it as you both "sharing time/attention" on the target object?
Is there a meaningful difference between share and upload any more? "I have something on my device, I want to put it somewhere else" is how that icon is used in iOS and OSX, and for almost all of my use cases, that seems to be correct.
Well, for me at least the difference is that uploading implies a single destination (I know this doesn't always hold, but conceptually I think it does. Otherwise there are multiple distinct uploads)
And sharing implies multiple agents, be them on a single or multiple destinations. I know my definition doesn't seem clearcut, but I think the implication is that you could share by means of uploading or you could share without uploading anything (excepting maybe "uploading" the link to someone else), but you can also upload without sharing anything (i.e. I upload to my private server) and that's why I consider them different concepts.
I think your over thinking it from the normal users point of view. I want to press the button to give this thing on my phone to other(s). How that happens isn't really my concern (link, full file, etc.).
I feel like if somebody did what Apple did for the cloud icon (i.e., came up with a canonical geometric representation[1]) to the 'Graph Diagram'[2] mentioned in the article, then you'd find that everyone would just wind up using that.
As noted in your first link, the concept of a circle based cloud was around in the 70s on BBC, if not other places too. I drew one for my consulting firm in 2006, before Mobile Me adopted one.
Rather than "Share", read the action as "Send to".
This clarifies the author's preference for icons with the arrows, fits with the usual mix of upload/post-to-social-app/open-in-other-app actions, and removes the motivation for the somewhat out-of-place milkshake icon.
(You can keep the 'share' label for marketing purposes if you want...)
Exactly. Apple does not refer to this icon as the 'share' icon in official documentation. It is actually the 'action' button[1]. As in, I have some data in this app, and I want to do something with it outside of this app. Hence, the symbol of an arrow moving outside of something.
Many of the possible actions resulting from tapping that icon (on iOS) may be unrelated social sharing (e.g., copy, save to photo library, assign to contact, etc.).
Not a fan of icons with a grid or connected dots. To me that means "viral." Usually I don't care whether the video goes viral, I just want my friends to see it, a one-to-many connection. How about a megaphone?
For me 'sharing' is about communicating, about passing on a message. A speech bubble is the best representation in my mind... but that is already used for comments.
It seems like "just pick something arbitrary and everyone agree on it" is a better solution than "find a small simple icon that effectively evokes 'share' to a brand new user." In other words, this is confusing not because the icons don't represent sharing well enough, but because they're different on every platform. There are lots of things on computers that aren't immediately obvious, but once you learn the convention, you don't forget it. I don't care which one we use, but we need to be consistent. (Ok, not the milkshake.)
There is some irony to the fact that we cannot 'share' what the 'share icon' is supposed to look like.
Unless some decree comes down from The President or the security council of the UN then we will probably have Apple/Microsoft/Android variants for a long time to come. There is no incentive for social networks to have a standard icon because they want sharing to be their icon/logo. Maybe it might be a better convention to perpetuate the share button as being uniquely un-shareable just for meme value.
There is no doubt in my mind, that the milkshake is the best possible icon for sharing. The only thing that could conceivably be better would be a Lady-and-the-Tramp-style single-strand spaghetti dinner, but that might be hard to draw.
I grew up drinking milkshakes, but I didn't know that sharing one is a thing in America! So, add another two billion people to that number (highly scientific estimate).
The whole soda fountain phenomenon was before our time, so I'm not sure that milkshakes were available at most soda fountains, but it's easy to imagine the tableau relocated to the ice cream shop. The "milkshake icon" seems more evocative than the "soda icon".
But sharing a milkshake isn't like sharing a piece of music. If I saw the icon below an article, I'd think, "read this article with another person". (Ok, maybe I would think 'share', but that doesn't make it a good symbol.)
I like this article, and I tend to agree with its conclusions about which ones are most common on most platforms, but isn't this at best heuristics and at worst wrong assumptions?
Like, I would use these as my heuristic guidelines if I was on the job and constraints dictate that I can't spend time on researching icons. But I wouldn't write a blog post authoritatively telling people that one icon is more recognized that the other without having some kind of research to back it up.
Then again, the author does say at one point that their research is extremely informal, so maybe I'm just projecting my feelings about the cowboy nature of the UX profession right now. But I still feel like they could do more to qualify that these just appear to be their best guesses about how people interpret the share icon.
The author seems to be quite fond of Apple's iOS6-era Share icon. It would be interesting to ask somebody who isn't familiar with Apple's products what that icon means. I've always found it a bit confusing.
In general, this kind of thing would actually be a interesting research project.
165 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadWhen you think about sharing a milkshake, you have two people sharing an experience; when you think about the open hand, looks like you are expecting someone to show up to hand over something to him or maybe begging.
My feeling when I click share or retweet is like I am shooting to stars and the odds that my bullet get to a black hole are huge.
The outgoing or upload are nouns that don't mean share either.
The Google Android - three dots approach seems to be the simplest, most logical, where one becomes two (or more).
The same thing happen with information, it goes from one place to another. The fact that this action takes many forms doesn't really matter.
This really isn't about sharing, its about sending the content outwards. The subsequent action will dictate whether its to share or pass to another program or even copying for a later paste.
Its sending the "thing" outwards...away from yourself. To something else.
Fascinating article!
The new Apple icon is less abstract, but it does seem to scream upload/send to server, which is also a function I might expect in similar situations as a share function; I think the old one is better because it points to the side signifying communication towards a peer.
The Windows 8 one is fine, easily understandable in context for the same reasons as the new Android one, but it lacks any semblance of directionality. It's a bit hilarious that it's almost identical to the Ubuntu icon.
The other two are terrible and I probably wouldn't expect them to signify sharing even in a context where I'd expect the functionality.
Edit: Of course I am an Android user so this may just be (confirmation?) bias at work. :)
I disagree. I think you're just rationalizing your own knowledge of what this means. And I say that because, as someone who's never used Android, I have literally never seen that icon before. And if I had seen it in a context other than a blog post about share icons, I would have had no idea whatsoever what it meant.
But "share" is often used for emailing, or just marking a file as "public" in its existing storage.
Except that every standard form of sharing involves uploading to a server – very few are actually handled in a peer-to-peer fashion (bluetooth sharing between adjacent devices is the exception, not the rule).
The odd part about the Android icons is that they imply "make public" or "send to multiple locations". Neither may be the case. Email to a single recipient is the likely common case. You might just be uploading to your personal network drive (no other users, just yourself).
The Android share icon has been around since (at least?) 2006 and was used a lot on websites, particularly Wordpress-based sites.
It was initially open source but then sold Share This and trademarked. Most services use the icon shape without ST's green button background.
As an entrepreneur or designer, am I going to waste who knows how much time interpreting the usage guidelines from Share This, or devote valuable space on my site to giving the Open Share people an attribution?
No. I'm going to spend 5 minutes designing something that won't cause future legal threats or trouble at acquisition time.
We need something with an MIT-like license on it.
As entrepreneur and designer, I go with the most common icon I find in Google images... which this happens to be.
Keep in mind, the trademark includes the green button background. That's significantly different.
(I'm actually not sure if this makes your SPAM analogy more or less appropriate.)
If I "share" via e-mail, then I transmit a document to others. After this, each recipient has a separate copy which, thereafter, is completely out of my control.
If I "share" via social network, then I upload a document. This makes a single copy, accessible to previously chosen people. It is (depending on the social network) somewhat under my control. Others can comment on it.
If I "share" via something like Dropbox, then I make the document accessible to others. No copy is made. If I share via URL, then I give read access. If I make a shared folder, then I give both read and write access.
Now, we techies know these are different things. Our mental model of non-technical users' thinking might suggest that, to them, these are all the same kind of action.
But are they?
Does an average non-technical user think of folder sharing, Facebook posts, and e-mail messages as the same category of action? I'm not sure he does.
Expanding on that, and with the clear examples you gave, maybe the thing is that traditional or classic icons pictures the channel where the information was traveling and not the action itself.
A fax icon implies sending a document because everyone knows that a fax can only send documents. So the icon is representing the channel.
Same for the envelope icon with email (or even snail mail). It pictures the channel, not the action.
If you see a group of icons, one with the Facebook icon, one with Reddit's, one with Slashdot's, etc, you automatically know that it has to do with that particular channel, even if the action per se might not be clear enough, e.g. if I click the Facebook icon, what action am I taking? am I uploading/sending/sharing/pasting/chatting/emailing?
I don't care, I only care that the channel is the correct one. The service that administers that channel is the responsible one for doing what the user expects.
So maybe a fundamental flaw, like you say, is that different actions represent different channels but we are trying to put actions AND channels under a single umbrella, then there's no surprise that you can find lots of edge cases where the idea doesn't apply.
Yep, they are. It's impossible to share digital data without making a copy that is not under your control. There are some difference in write permissions, but people also do understand those.
"Sharing" with a group of people like in Facebook (where each one can essentially change the nature of the thing in real time by commenting on it or liking it) is also somewhat distinct from the other two because it makes a send-time copy that can be changed (in limited ways) by people other than you in possibly unpredictable ways.
Now shareD as a state is how the metaphor makes sense, for content stored at a common resource where one can take it back later, like your profile on a social network. So a better use that would hold the right nuances would be:
- Publish for making copies of the content and sending them to channels where one doesn't have control.
- Shared / Private for the status of content on channels on which you keep control to change that status.
Unfortunately, the needs of social sites (that try to make as much shared information as possible, and avoid people to withdraw it) have promoted the current confusing usage and spoiled it for all.
A social network or blog does not. They're objects that are shared.
Using separate icons for "share" vs "send" would make sense to users.
I'm thinking some kind of "upload" metaphor vs "message" metaphor is right. Messaging metaphors are easy, but upload is a bit more tricky... Apple might have the right idea - but Apple's "out of box" icon is too vague, obviously because of Apple's need to keep icons elegantly simple. I'd go for a bit more complexity:
An arrow pointing at a globe. When you share something, you share with the internet. MS Office used globes to represent the Web - like a chain+globe for a hyperlink and whatnot. Use that - an arrow at the globe implies you're sending something to the Internet (and generally a public or semi-public place on the Web specifically).
Which I think is actually kind of ok, because again not everything has a simple obvious icon. Some things might be better served with just standardizing on an abstract and distinct shape. Newcomers may not know what a floppy disk is but they will learn the association anyway. And it just becomes one of those cool bits of lore that nerds like, double win!
The computer world is the one that limited these concepts.
Before web: you can only copy and give.
After web: you can give, or publish.
After cloud: you can give, publish, and share.
I think these concepts should be as well differentiated in the digital world as they are in the physical.
(The second and third sections are what can now be extended by developers in iOS 8.)
Including : * Printing the document * Viewing a video on my TV * Mailing it * Marking it to Read Later * Copying the URL * etc...
technically it's more a "Send to another application"
In terms of the milkshake, that's the perfect icon. You actually share something when you stop having "a whole" and now you have "a part" but then someone else has "a part" as well. That's what I've seen parent teach their kids over and over again. Sharing the ball: we both use it, share your candy we both enjoy it, even if it means I'll have less.
With electronic articles and other media that gets shared, you actually share nothing in that sense, you just let someone know about it, whilst still keeping the whole yourself.
I know that semantically you can also "share information", and you lose nothing by doing it. But my point is that maybe most people associate sharing with "losing a bit to give to someone else" instead of just "letting know".
I am thinking hard and haven't come up with a better word, I admit it, but maybe there is actually a better word for describing that "electronic share" action?
The bullhorn looks promising, but like someone said, it looks like an axe is too small. And also someone else said it would have to be different enough from a volume icon.
Maybe two hands apart, one with a piece of "the whole" and the other hand with the other piece?
In that regard I liked the Android icon a lot, even though it's a bit too abstract. But it conveys the idea that you just multiplied the information, without losing anything yourself. Maybe a diagram of an "information bus" could work? like a straight horizontal line with a perpendicular line protuding from it, indicating that you keep going but still produced a new path/road/source?
Edit: added clarification
What about thinking of it as you both "sharing time/attention" on the target object?
And sharing implies multiple agents, be them on a single or multiple destinations. I know my definition doesn't seem clearcut, but I think the implication is that you could share by means of uploading or you could share without uploading anything (excepting maybe "uploading" the link to someone else), but you can also upload without sharing anything (i.e. I upload to my private server) and that's why I consider them different concepts.
It bothered me when I first used iOS7, but now it simply makes sense. I still don't like the thinness of the icon, but at least it's sensible.
[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThereIsOnlyOneCloudIconInTheEn...
[2] https://bold.pixelapse.com/minming/share-the-icon-no-one-agr...
This clarifies the author's preference for icons with the arrows, fits with the usual mix of upload/post-to-social-app/open-in-other-app actions, and removes the motivation for the somewhat out-of-place milkshake icon.
(You can keep the 'share' label for marketing purposes if you want...)
Many of the possible actions resulting from tapping that icon (on iOS) may be unrelated social sharing (e.g., copy, save to photo library, assign to contact, etc.).
[1]: UIBarButtonSystemItemAction; https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/uikit/...
i find it confusing.
Unless some decree comes down from The President or the security council of the UN then we will probably have Apple/Microsoft/Android variants for a long time to come. There is no incentive for social networks to have a standard icon because they want sharing to be their icon/logo. Maybe it might be a better convention to perpetuate the share button as being uniquely un-shareable just for meme value.
There is no doubt in my mind, that the milkshake is the best possible icon for sharing. The only thing that could conceivably be better would be a Lady-and-the-Tramp-style single-strand spaghetti dinner, but that might be hard to draw.
http://www.best-norman-rockwell-art.com/images/1921-Norman-R...
The whole soda fountain phenomenon was before our time, so I'm not sure that milkshakes were available at most soda fountains, but it's easy to imagine the tableau relocated to the ice cream shop. The "milkshake icon" seems more evocative than the "soda icon".
Like, I would use these as my heuristic guidelines if I was on the job and constraints dictate that I can't spend time on researching icons. But I wouldn't write a blog post authoritatively telling people that one icon is more recognized that the other without having some kind of research to back it up.
Then again, the author does say at one point that their research is extremely informal, so maybe I'm just projecting my feelings about the cowboy nature of the UX profession right now. But I still feel like they could do more to qualify that these just appear to be their best guesses about how people interpret the share icon.
In general, this kind of thing would actually be a interesting research project.