Google Chrome 19 landed yesterday, bringing with it Web Intents, a new method for web sites/apps to communicate with one another. We wrote about Web Intents earlier this month, but now that it’s here we are making good on our promise and rolling out a suite of AddThis features to help publishers and users take advantage of Web Intents right off the bat:

Web Intents Support

Want to add Web Intent support to your site? If you use AddThis, you already have. Just drop this line into your addthis_toolbox:

<a class=”addthis_button_intent_share_url”></a>

Web Intents users will be able to share your page through their favorite intent handler just like any other service.

Intents support for non-Chrome users

Web Intents are great for Chrome users, but what about the other two-thirds of visitors? AddThis provides another one-liner to make web intents work no matter what. Set:

addthis_config.webintents = true;

and AddThis will handle Intent events in the absence of native support. Implement Web Intents however you like—in the AddThis toolbox or not—and rest assured that your visitors will have access to their preferred service.

The AddThis Intent Handler

For those of you testing out your brand-spanking-new Chrome installs, remember that not all of your favorite services have an intent handler in the Chrome Web Store yet. Not to worry—AddThis does! Install it as you would a normal Chrome extension and give it a spin on a demo intent.

Watch this Space

As Web Intents grows, so will our support for it. Meanwhile, we’re developing tools to enable OExchange providers to handle Web Intents and integrating intent handling into our browser extensions.

Web Intents is a new tool in your sharing arsenal, and AddThis is thrilled to support it! Your feedback on our Web Intents support is invaluable, both now and in the coming months as your implementation of intents evolves alongside Web Intents itself.

A common challenge among all site owners – bloggers, brands and large publishers alike – is getting their users to consume more content and stay engaged. Let’s be honest, the internet has made us all ADD and our focus drifts easily.  This is why we’ve launched a new plugin called the Trending content box — an easy-to-grab feed that pulls in your most popular content and begs for the wandering eye to CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.

What is it?

The Trending content box is built on top of AddThis’ powerful data processing capabilities to surface the top social traffic from across your site in a simple to install plugin.  When a visitor finishes reading content (or loses focus), they ask to themselves, “Ooo, what’s this?” unable to resist the top trending article on Facebook you created a few days ago.
What’s that?  It’s customizable, too?

Of course, we know nothing on the web is one size fits all, so as we do with all of our tools, we made the Trending content box completely customizable. You can jazz it up with your own design, choose the number of links to show, even set the date range of content displayed. We highly encourage you to get after it!

One of the best parts about the Trending content box is that if you own multiple sites you can cross promote the top social content from these sites.  

Other ideas for using your new favorite feature

Looking to increase engagement from off your domain?  Check out our API to embed your top social content into things like:

• Your email newsletter
• A Facebook brand page
• Inside your native mobile application

Where there’s AddThis, there’s data

No matter where you integrate the Trending content box, there is a new module in your analytics dashboard that shows you how many additional pageviews this plugin is generating for you. What? Did you think we would give you an awesome new tool and not give you analytics to track against it? Give us more credit than that!

So don’t just sit there watching your exit rate with a sad face. Get your very own (or one we designed for you!) Trending content box for your site here.

Here’s a problem you might like to have:

One day, your blog is linked on the front page of the New York Times. You’re suddenly getting thousands of hits an hour, way more than you normally get in a week. Most of those visitors read your post and leave; a few might be motivated to poke around your archives, or subscribe to your feed. Although the spike looks awesome in Google Analytics, it doesn’t earn you anything commensurate with the traffic volume. If there was a way to easily detect these new visitors and encourage them to do something useful, you could turn a lucky break into lasting value.

We had this problem. That’s why we’ve created the Welcome bar.

Disclaimer: Only an image. Were this a real Welcome bar, you’d probably click on it.

It welcomes your users by appearing at the top of your site and asking them to perform a single action—to share this content on their favorite site, to follow you on your social network of choice, or to visit another page. In our testing thus far, we’ve found that conversion rates for personalized, targeted calls to action like this are orders of magnitude more effective than normal on-page sharing tools, by pageview.

What makes our Welcome bar different from other social bars is that it’s built on our awesome data APIs. You can leverage what we know about our 1.3 billion users across our network of millions of sites to customize your calls to action to achieve specific goals–like getting your content shared, increasing your follow count, increasing sales, and more.

Let’s take that New York Times example. The Welcome bar makes it easy to set up different rules for different scenarios. You might want to thank everyone from the Times and also invite them to retweet the article if they’re into Twitter. If they’re not a Twitter user, you can direct them to your newsletter subscription form.

The Twitter users could see this:

…while everyone else sees this:

On the backend, you get a simple module in your analytics console showing how many times we’ve shown the bar to a matched user, and of those sessions, how many times the user’s taken the suggested action:

As you can see, the New York Times has not linked to my blog. Yet!

That way you can justify the ROI of taking over 35 prime pixels. (And you can always style the bar using your own CSS.)

To help make this more clear, here’s a live example. When you click that link, it’ll invite you to Tweet this blog post if you’re a Twitter user; if you’re not a Twitter user, you’ll be invited to return to the blog. If you reload the page, you’ll get a generic message inviting you to learn more about the bar. And if you happen to live in my neighborhood, I’ll invite you to a concert.

The Welcome bar API allows you to target hundreds of different user states. Want to show a promotion to users from a specific ZIP code? There’s an API for that. Want to show different messages to new versus returning users? There’s an API for that, too. We support targeting by time of day, preferred services, referring service, browser type, and more.

But you don’t need to be a JavaScript wizard to use the Welcome bar. Our simple configuration tool lets you define the visitors you want to target, configure the bar’s appearance and choose the action you want the visitor to take.

If there’re interesting conditions we haven’t added to the API yet, we’d love to hear about them! Our goal is to provide all the intelligence you need to target your users for simple calls to action. We’d also love know what other capabilities you’d like the bar to have, beyond sharing, following, and linking.

Just grab the Welcome bar code and see how easy it is to get started.

Questions? Comments? Send ‘em our way!