The AddThis Blog

One of the most popular ways to make your Web site and widgets shareable is the AddThis Toolbox introduced earlier this year. Publishers and users love having one-click access to any of the hundreds of available services.

But with such great diversity, we’ve heard from publishers that it can be a problem to choose the right handful of services. We thought so, too. Back in late September, we announced user-level personalization of the AddThis Menu based on the users browser locale and previous share history. This helps us to surface the most relevant services to your users when they want them.

Today we’re adding that power to Toolbox through the AddThis Menu API. The same technology which learns from your past sharing history to personalize the Menu now lets you personalize the services that are displayed within the AddThis Toolbox.

Displaying the right services at the right time to the right user helps your users share your content. Take a look at it and let us know what you think.download avatar movie

With so many possibilities in the AddThis platform for helping Web sites become more social and shareable, we need your opinion! Stop by the forum to share your thoughts and ideas!

We’re really psyched to be adding an additional 26 services to the AddThis Service Directory. You and your users can start sharing to these services using interfaces like the AddThis Menu and AddThis Toolbox, starting today.

Pop the menu to share to: Adifni, aero, Box.net, Camyoo, Cirip, ClassicalPlace, Clickazoo, COSMiQ, Digo, Dipdive, eLert Gadget, Farkinda, Favable, Flaker, Friendster, Hedgehogs, Hot Bookmark, Instapaper, Livefavoris, Sekoman, Spruzer, Surfpeople, Yazzem, Youbookmarks, and WireFan, as well as hundreds of other services.

Or perhaps you want to share with a friend via e-mail, but you miss the comfort of your favorite e-mail app? Starting today, you can share through your desktop e-mail client–like Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc–instead of our e-mail form.

All in all this puts us up to 233 services that are supported by the AddThis platform. If there’s anything that we’re missing in the AddThis Service Directory, we want to know about. Please submit those services. For those of you who have submitted a service but haven’t heard back yet, we really appreciate your patience as we work our way through the queue.

As the universal sharing platform for the Web, we’re excited to continue moving AddThis in the direction where we enable anyone to share anything anywhere. Over the coming months, we’re looking to add new services that allow people to share more Web sites and widgets into their favorite communities, no matter the size.

Today, I’m really excited to announce the launch of AddThis Labs. Over the last year, AddThis has started a new chapter of its life. It’s evolved from a mere button on a few pages to become the Web’s universal sharing platform, seen by over 600 million people every month (hailing from countries all across the world!), on a menagerie of 550,000 Web sites. Given that level of diversity, it only makes sense that we’ve been running some experiments and listening to our users. AddThis Labs is all about opening that process up even further.

Our first Labs project is the AddThis Sharebar. Sharebar is a great example of the flexibility of our APIs; it uses the Sharing Endpoints to create a completely new on-page interface for sharing online content. We’re excited to see how new interfaces like the Sharebar will change how users interact with a page and the 207 services that we’ve integrated into the AddThis platform.

Secondly, we’re launching AddThis iPhone-Optimized Analytics. Using some of our more avatar movie elaborate internal Analytics APIs, we revisualized the data specifically for the iPhone, so you can keep track of how your content is getting shared while you’re on the go. Try it out by typing addthis.com/iphone into Safari on your iPhone.

If you play with any of the Labs projects, stop by the forum. We’d love to hear your feedback. We see a lot of possibilities in the AddThis platform: these two projects came out of a single hackathon! But while we place a high value on innovation–and there’s crazier stuff to come–but the end goal is improving things for you, our users. We need your comments and ideas to make that happen.

Over the coming months, we’re going to be releasing more of our internal projects and experiments into AddThis Labs. Check back often for more exciting examples of cool and innovative ways that you can harness the power of the AddThis platform.

Today, we are happy to announce that AddThis now supports widget, or embeddable-content, sharing in addition to Web page sharing. Clearspring created the first widget-sharing platform, Launchpad. We have taken the best features from Launchpad and are making them available via AddThis. The result is a faster-loading, easier-to-implement platform that can share and track both widgets and Web pages. And best of all, it’s free!

In fall 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, the number one bookmarking and sharing service for Web pages. Our vision was to establish a universal sharing platform for the Web – a single platform empowering online publishers and advertisers to enable their users to share any content (widgets, Web pages, etc.) with anyone, anywhere.

It is so exciting to be taking such a big leap toward that vision. AddThis is our universal sharing platform.

Over the next several months, Launchpad users will be joining the AddThis Community. As they do so, we will continue to improve our ability to share widget content with more destinations, analytics and other great features.

It’s been a tremendous year. AddThis now reaches over 600 million users across the world, up from just 200 million last year. We now support over 200 total services and 50 languages, all with the help of our amazing community.

Thank you for your continued support. We’re excited to see what the next year will bring.

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Monday, after the long Thanksgiving break, we all slogged back to work and while at work, started to buy online all the new toys and gizmos that we want to give and get this holiday season. Yes, it was Cyber Monday.

Well, we looked at 15 of the top e-commerce sites that use AddThis to see if there was any interesting data that popped up. We found a few interesting nuggets…

• From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, there was a 78% increase in sharing on those e-commerce sites.
• The top 5 services for those e-commerce sites were E-mail, Facebook, Print, Google Bookmarks, and Delicious.
• From the previous Monday to Cyber Monday, e-commerce related services like Amazon Wishlist and Kaboodle both saw ~20-25% increases in usage.
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We’re going to continue to keep an eye on this as the holiday season progresses. We’ll let you know what we see.