The AddThis Blog

In September 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, making us the leading distributed sharing platform. Our vision for the combined entity was simple – provide the web with a simple platform to make it simple to share any content, to anyone, anytime.

The growth that we have experienced since then has been stunning. When we joined forces, we reached around 200MM unique users. With your help we have more than doubled that reach. As of April 2009, comScore Extended Web reports that we now reach over half a billion people – nearly 50% of the entire global web.

As we have rushed to keep pace with our growth, we’ve laid the groundwork to enable the realization of our vision for a truly open content sharing platform. We started by leveraging the knowledge, functionality, and infrastructure to improve AddThis. We’ve revamped the Web site, rewrote the AddThis JavaScript client, created in depth documentation and support mechanisms, and applied our world-class analytics infrastructure to improve the AddThis reporting experience. To date, these changes have been made to improve AddThis as a platform for sharing links. Today, we are taking the first step towards making AddThis the one-stop-shop for developers wanting to enable sharing beyond links.

Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website. Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them. We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.

No cake is complete without the icing. So responding to popular demand, we added a set of blogging services as sharing destinations that you may remember from Clearspring – Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress.com and Tumblr. We also added our friends from Plaxo.

As you can see, this is a jam packed update. We are taking our platform in what we think is a big and exciting direction. So please keep up the great feedback. Feel free to let us know what works for you, but also what doesn’t work. Drop a comment on the blog post, start a thread in our forum, or e-mail me directly – justin@addthis.com.

Previously we highlighted JS-Kit and their powerful commenting system, this month we wanted to point you to our friends at Lijit. They provide a free search tool that allows you to make all your online content searchable. Your readers get relevant search results while you get detailed stats about what people are searching for and where they’re coming from. Install them on your Web site or blog today.

Happyinkheart download Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.

Kudos to our Creative Director Jeff for making this very special Mother’s Day edition of the AddThis logo.

Last week, we mentioned how we had moved our SSL-supporting AddThis code over to an even stronger infrastructure, the content delivery network Akamai. Well, as of today, all AddThis code (SSL supporting and non-supporting) is now being served from Akamai.

We realize that putting a piece of third party JavaScript on your Web site, like AddThis, takes a bit of faith in us. Well you can rest assured that we’re putting the money and resources behind giving you guys the best infrastructure we can get.

Can’t get much better than Akamai. It’s what we’ve used to serve up the distributed assets for the Clearspring widget platform, so we have a great relationship together. (Note: Clearspring is the parent company of AddThis.)

Hopefully you’re noticing that the AddThis button is loading even speedier then usual.

If you have any questions about this, don’t hesitate to the wrestler downloaddrop us a line. Comment on this post, start a topic in the forum, or e-mail me personally – justin@addthis.com