The AddThis Blog

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!