The AddThis Blog

Today, we hit a milestone: the AddThis toolbars for Firefox and Internet Explorer have been downloaded over 1,000,000 times.

We’ve been totally blown away by how quickly the toolbars have taken off and grown at a rate that we didn’t expect, particularly considering the relatively short time that they’ve been available. It hasn’t even been a year since we built the first toolbar at a company hackathon.

An interesting fact, the people who share using the AddThis toolbars like to share a lot. They share 2-5x more often.

This milestone speaks to an increasing desire our users have to share content they love with anyone they want, however they want. We’re working hard to make that vision possible. I’m really excited by the opportunity to innovate around these products and evolve them in the future.

So, have you tried the AddThis toolbar yet? I’d love to hear what you think. What are your favorite services to use with it?

If you haven’t tried it, the AddThis toolbar is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you don’t use one of these browsers, we also have some other browser sharing tools like our Google Chrome extension and AddThis Bookmarklets.

Have fun sharing!

My favorite feature of the AddThis browser extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer is that it’s easy to customize my browser menu with my favorite services. Did you know you can Translate any page on the fly? Make The Book Of Eli downloadprinting easier by removing all of the navigation and other page elements, leaving just the content, with one click? Quickly share a link using your computer’s email application, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other email services? These and other services save me time and make sharing easy.

Sometimes we get asked why anyone would need over 230 AddThis services – why so many? The answer is, AddThis is used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world, and there are lots of different ways to interact with a webpage. Some services are more popular than others in different countries, and everyone has their own favorite ways to share. We created the AddThis Service Directory so anyone could submit their service; the AddThis menu then optimizes and personalizes the list to show the right services to the right person at the right time.

To demonstrate, here is a list of my favorite services that I’ve selected to be in my Firefox AddThis menu, using the Options… feature to create and order my list:

I can add any service from the complete list on the left, and change the order of my selected list using the arrows on the far right.

Here’s a little more information about my favorite services; clicking one will share this page so you can see how each works.

• Email Program: This service allows me to share any link to my computer’s default email application, opening a new message with the link already in the message body. No more copy-pasting links.
• Blogger: Share any link to one of my Blogger blogs. Blogger’s compose window let’s me pick which blog to share to, where I can save the post for later or go ahead and publish. Easy.
• Twitter: This lets me tweet any link; AddThis will automatically shorten links only if needed.
• Facebook: I post a lot of design-related links to Facebook, our most sharing popular service.
• Translate: Handy if you encounter a lot of pages in other languages. This service uses Google Translate to instantly determine the language and translate the page. You can even continue to browse the site in your own language thanks to Google’s use of frames.
• PDF Online: Quickly save any page as a PDF.
• Google Reader: Post and tag a link to your Google Reader shared items.
• PrintFriendly: Strip out navigation, ads, images and any other page elements you like to print only the content of a page. Quick and easy reading as well as printing.
• Print: I can use control-P, or use my browser’s menu, or some other way to Print. But hey, I’m using this menu all the time, so it’s convenient.

There are lots of other services and utilities to discover – what are your favorites? As always, we love feedback, so let us know how we can make AddThis even better.

Jim Lane, Director of User Experience for AddThis

A quick post-script: You might have noticed that Email Program is not yet available in the current version of the Firefox extension. You can get this service by installing the latest experimental version of the AddThis for Firefox addon on Mozilla. Just visit that page on Mozilla.com and scroll down and select “Get the Newest Version Now”. You heard it here first!

2009 was a busy year. Our vision was to build a great community, grow from a button into a platform, and fulfill our promise to enable online publishers to share anything (widgets, links), to anyone (multiple languages), anywhere (Facebook, MySpace and more).

I think we hit it out of the park. Our forum has grown from 0 to 60K+ members. And together, we have helped AddThis become the universal content sharing platform. This year, it has grown from being used by tens of thousands of sites to almost 600K websites and from reaching about 200 million to over 600 million people across the globe every month.

We are truly thankful to you for joining us for this adventure and look forward to a helluva 2010. Without further ado, let’s look back at 2009….

Share Anything – Now Supporting Widget Sharing

AddThis now goes beyond simple web page sharing via links. The platform can now be used for publishers wanting to share widgets(flash apps, video players, etc) to any of the different destinations that we support. This is the first of many new content types we plan to support in 2010.

Share To Anyone – 50+ Languages Supported

AddThis started with a handful of sherlock holmes movie languages supported. With the AddThis Language Translation Database, we’ve now translated the AddThis menu into over 50 languages. Part of what spurred us towards adding services more efficiently was requests coming from outside of the United States. So we knew localizing the menu needed to happen.

Share Anywhere – 230+ Services Supported

With the AddThis Service Directory, any new service around the world (Posterous, Friendster, Amen Me!) can become available to the millions of AddThis buttons installed around the world. This self-serve directory was launched in the 3rd quarter and helped us grow the number of services from 50 to over 230 in a quarter.

Share Smarter – Personalized Menu For Each User

We have leveraged our language database, service directory, and massive knowledge of consumer sharing patterns to deliverpersonalized menu experiences across the web. Our algorithmic approach ensures that users see the right service, at the right time. In Brazil? Orkut will probably appear 1st on the menu. In the US? Facebook takes the cake.

Share Your Way – 5 New Ways to Implement AddThis

We created five new ways, in addition to cutting-and-pasting the AddThis button, to implement the AddThis Platform:

• Toolbox: Publishers asked for a different look and feel for the AddThis sharing tool. So, with the AddThis Toolbox, you have individual service icons clickable right on the page rather than having to use the button.
• Sharebar: Most recently we launched the AddThis Sharebar, which is a different way to add sharing to your page as an unobtrusive toolbar at the base. This project is also the first member of AddThis Labs; A place for us to work with the community on fun new ways to make sharing better.
• APIs: Want to create your own sharing app, but want to control

  download daybreakers movie

  the look and feel? Our APIs enable you to go beyond the AddThis Button, Toolbox, and Sharebar widgets.

• Plugins: Don’t want to worry about cutting and pasting code to install AddThis? We released a number of new blog and CMS plug-ins for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Moveable Type to make it easier for publishers to integrate AddThis into their websites. Each has been downloaded tens of thousands of times.
• Browser Extensions: AddThis is nearly everywhere, but not quite yet. For those users that love AddThis and want to use it on any website they see, we created extensions for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. This program has been incredibly successful with nearly 1MM installs across browsers in less than a year. I know that I’m addicted to it because it makes sharing that much easier.