The AddThis Blog

Early yesterday morning, we got reports from some of our users that they were experiencing issues with the AddThis menu over SSL. We immediately found that the problem was on our end, caused by a misconfiguration that had propagated throughout our CDN. This misconfiguration did not affect our standard HTTP version of AddThis.

By mid-afternoon yesterday, we thought we had resolved the issue but continued to get reports of problems in certain geographic areas.

We decided the best course of action was to accelerate the migration of our secure code to Akamai, which is by far the BEST CDN in the business. We had planned on doing this next week for all of AddThis but because of the issues yesterday, opted to move a lot faster for our secure code.

As of this morning, it looks like everything went smoothly with the migration to the new CDN and that this has resolved the outage. You should no longer be seeing any issues. All reports from customers thus far have been positive.

With the capabilities and immense infrastructure provided to us by our new CDN, we don’t foresee having a similar problem like this any time in the future. Secure AddThis users also should see a pretty significant boost in performance.

We sincerely apologize for this problem. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. You can comment on this blog, drop a note on the main forum thread for this issue, or e-mail me personally. – justin@addthis.com

So… what do our CEO Hooman Radfar, our Board of Directors, and President Obama all have in common? Well, they’re all featured in the May issue of the Washingtonian.

Hooman and each member of Clearspring‘s Board of Directors were featured as 100 of the top “Tech Titans” in Washington, DC. (Note: Clearspring is the parent company of AddThis.) Oh, and I, your humble community manager, made the list as well.

I was hoping that we could point you to the link but right now the story is only available in the print edition. We’ve taken these photos as an adequate substitute:

President Obama, in the now infamous cover with a photo of him shirtless, was featured as one of the 26 reasons why people love living in DC.

Today, we’re really excited to announce that we’ve established a terms of services agreement with the US General Services Administration (GSA). This will provide federal agencies with the ability to more freely use AddThis on their Web sites.

The government provides so much great content on the Web. By using AddThis and making their content shareable, the federal government can make it easy for their existing users to help get the content disseminated to every corner of the Social Web and into the hands of United States citizens.

You can already find AddThis being utilized on federal Web sites like the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, and USA.gov. We hope to announce more agencies soon.

In addition to AddThis, to date, the GSA has signed agreements with Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Blist, Slideshare, and blip.tv.

If you’re a federal agency and would like to find out more information about our terms of services agreement, feel free to drop me a line – justin@addthis.com

Even in a world of Facebook & MySpace, one of the most prominent ways that people like to share is via e-mail. People love to e-mail things to their friends but one thing that’s a pain is remembering your friends’ e-mail addresses.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that that we’ve integrated Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo e-mail systems right into the AddThis menu. I realize that we took a little bit long on getting this out but we wanted to make sure that we did this right. Our goal is to always maintain our high level of performance with any new features we roll out.

Here’s a screenshot:

When sending an e-mail, there is an option to use your address book. Click “Use Your Address Book”, select your e-mail provider, put in your credentials, and you’ll be presented with your address book. Just select the name and e-mail address of the person you want to share with and they’ll get put in the To: field of the e-mail.

A few things to note… We noticed this morning after we launched that the address book names aren’t in alphabetical order. We’ll be fixing this. In addition, address book integration for right now is only available in English. We’ll be folding in the rest of our localizations very soon.

As part of this release, we also launched a bit of a redesign of the “more menu.” This is the menu that comes up when you click the more option on the menu of default options you just get from hovering over the AddThis button. The list of sharing destinations was getting REALLY long and we wanted to set it up in a way that it would scale as we add more destinations in the future. We’ve also added a search box at the top, so you can even more quickly parse through the big list.

Here’s a screenshot:

Lastly, after a user has shared an e-mail using AddThis and if they use Firefox, they’ll be presented with a promotion for our AddThis plug-in for Firefox. We have found that users who use the plug-in are the power sharers. They share more often than anyone. By encouraging users to install the plug-in, we’re helping them make the sharing power of AddThis even more accessible to them than ever before. The user won’t have to go looking for the button on your page if they want to share your content. They can just share.

Here’s what that looks like:

As always, if you have any comments, thoughts, or concerns, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We LOVE talking to our users. Drop a comment on this blog post, start a discussion topic in our forum, or even e-mail me directly – justin@addthis.com.

Thanks and keep sharing!

At AddThis, our goal is to make it drop dead easy to share online content and make your content shareable. Today, we’ve made two really cool advancements, which help us move in that direction.

Ever have the feeling, “Man! I wish this web page had AddThis on it so that I could share it with my friends” ? Well, I do all the time. So… this is an itch that we decided to scratch. Today, we’re excited to announce AddThis for Firefox.

It’s a plug-in which will put the orange plus sign that you’ve all come to know and love right at the top of your browser. So… whenever you see a Web site that you think is rad and want to bookmark it or share it with your friends, you can share it with just a couple of clicks.

If you’re a power sharer, like me, you’ll find yourself using this thing all the frickin’ time. Oh… and the best part is that the plug-in works with any of the over 40 different destinations that AddThis can share with. Try it out and let us know what you think.

Secondly, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ve redone the get the button code process, made it a little more straight forward, and given publishers the option of getting the code for the AddThis button without having to register for an account. We hope that this starts to remove any and all barriers that could stand between someone and getting the button. We want it to be EASY.

An important note: if you opt to get the code without registering, you WON’T get analytics. If you want to get analytics later, you’ll have to go through the registration process and get a brand new button code. We won’t be able to give you your past analytics

As always, let us know what you think of this release or anything at all. Drop me a comment on this blog post, put up a topic post in the forum, or e-mail me personally – justin@addthis.com

Share on!

Note: Yes, I realize the URL says March and that the title said that for a little bit.  Some how I missed that.  Sorry.  *sips espresso*

Every quarter, we take some time as a company to look back at how things went during the last quarter and then talk about our plans for the next one. As usual, the respective Clearspring offices go out on the town after the meeting and have some fun together. (Note: Clearspring is the parent company of AddThis.)

Well, we did it up this year.

Below is photographic evidence of the shenanigans from our various offices. We haven’t gotten the photos from the West Coast office yet. I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

Team NYC

Team Virginia

Note: This post was also put up on the Clearspring company blog.

The purpose of AddThis is to help your Web pages get shared far and wide to every corner of the Social Web. Yet, all too often when I’m surfing around the Web, I see that a publisher has put the share button in the very bottom corner of the site where no one will see it.

If your user comes to your site, thinks it’s really rad, and wants to share it, you should make the AddThis button really obviously placed so your users can find it. Put your AddThis button front and center. The faster users can find the button the more likely it is they will share. The more your users share your content the more traffic you’ll get.

The AddThis button is the most widely used sharing button on the Web. It’s loaded over 20 billion times every month, all across the Web by users all over the world. It has become the de facto standard. When users see it, they’ll recognize it.

Here are two examples of folks who do it right…

Frank Gruber of the personal technology lifestyle blog Somewhat Frank makes his AddThis button easy to find:

The entirely adorable Web site The Daily Puppy also puts AddThis front and center:

Where is the AddThis button on your site? How’s it been going for you guys?

Seems like every day I’m getting some kind of deal on something sent to my inbox in the form of an HTML e-mail newsletter. Often, I find myself thinking, “oh I know a friend who’d really enjoy this.”

Do you run one of these HTML e-mail newsletters? You can make it shareable with AddThis.

Here’s how you do it…

• Go to AddThis.com
• Make sure you’ve registered or have logged in
• Click on “Get the Button”
• Look for the pull down box labeled “Where”, for where you want to put the button.
• Click on “in an E-zine or Newsletter”
• Specify the URL for the Web-based version of the HTML e-mail newsletter
• Click “Get Your Button Code”
• On the next page, grab the code and stick it in your HTML e-mail newsletter
• You’re done.

It’s that easy.

Give it a try on your e-mail newsletter and then let me know what you think. – justin@addthis.com

All morning, we’ve been hearing noises coming from the ceiling of Clearspring’s World Corporate Headquarters in McLean, VA. It sounded like something was in the ceilings. None of us could figure out what it was.

Well, as you can see from the photo above, we identified the spy that had infiltrated our office. It was a bird.

It was pretty entertaining to watch as a handful of our engineers spent a good 10 minutes trying to catch it. We were able to safely get it into a box and release it outside.

Now the investigation begins where we try to figure out who was trying to spy on our office and discover our secret new technologies that will give us world domination. Could it have been Twitter or Flock perhaps? Hahaha. Rimshot

Hope you’re all having a great day.

PS – This is not an April Fools Day joke. We really did find a bird in our office.

As most of you know, we’ve been testing some new services that help to promote and recommend content that has been shared using AddThis. Well, the test is over.

The test went really well. We learned some really important things and you all gave us a lot of great feedback.

I’m excited for you all to see what we’ve been working on. We’re working hard to come up with new and interesting ways that we can help get your content shared farther out to every corner of the Social Web.