As services evolve and change their brand, we try to monitor trends as close as possible. Recently, we reached out to Twitter because we’ve noticed that they’ve been using the bird icon instead of the “T”. Often times it’s scary to change an icon that has so much recognition across the web. The first thing I usually ask is if the icon change will affect share rate. This is something that we’re going to be monitoring closely, and I’d love to share the results after we collect enough data.

New Icons:

Old Icons:

If you have AddThis installed on your site, we automatically update your icons on a regular basis. Also, if you run a service in the AddThis menu and you are changing your icons, be sure to let us know!

Here are some of the interesting sharing trends that we noticed in 2010…

Last night I had the opportunity to present a talk at Refresh DC titled “Designing for One Billion People.” It was an honor to present some of the amazing work the AddThis design and development teams have undertaken in the last two years, as we’ve grown the platform to over one billion users.

I touched on five strategies for designing to grow quickly:

• Designing for growth: put customers first, establish a style and stick with it, keep a creative team as small as possible, iterate often and fail quickly.
• Being “dangerously open”: embrace open standards, transparency, and empowering your customers to help you build your product.
• Being data-informed: measure and test as much as possible, and use that information to inform product, design and business decisions.
• Building to scale: Utilize a CDN, optimize code as well as images, and don’t forget to scale technical support and QA
• Embracing customers: Listen to customers and engage them directly; put social media to work as a feedback cycle, not just a marketing channel; embrace beta-testing and empower developers who want to build tools for you.

Here are the slides from the talk.

AddThis: Designing for One Billion People – RefreshDC