Its very easy to send the url of any page on the web to a friend. You just copy the url from the browser url bar and paste it into your email. It doesn't need to be a feature of a web site to do something that is already a trivial task.

If one were to want to implement this as a feature the way to do it would be to implement a control that could be included in the layout.master file of the skin in order to have it on all pages in a site. This control would provide a link to a page where the user could enter his friend's email addres to send a link to the friend.

There are several problems to this though. First you would be needing to use a captcha to prevent spam bots from using the feature to send spam from your site. Once you add a captcha you have already made the task more difficult than just copying the url and emailing it. People hate captchas.

Another problem is the mail isn't really coming from the sender but from the site web server, so the recipient may percieve this as spam coming unsolicited from a web site rather than a social gesture from a friend. This is also potentially in violation of the CAN SPAM act that could get the site owner in trouble.

Furthermore its just bad etiquette for any friend of mine to share my email address with some web site. If they want to share their own email thats ok but don't share mine, thats bad manners indeed.

I know some people want this kind of feature anyway so at some point I may implement a feature for this but if I do implement it I will still recommend not using it.

Best,

Joe