Category Archives: Updates

Significant updates to the AddThis platform.

Scheduled Downtime for AddThis.com

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UPDATE: we’ve held back one more day for preparation, the site outage will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, July 26th between 5AM EDT and 7AM EDT (9 AM to 11 AM GMT). Thanks for your patience!

Hey everybody! We’re performing some database upgrades tomorrow, we’ve scheduled downtime for our site on Tuesday, July 26th between 5AM EDT and 7AM EDT (9 AM to 11 AM GMT). The following services will be unavailable during this window:

AddThis.com
The support forums
Analytics.

Sharing will still be available and analytics will still be collected. We’ll be updating our status page (http://status.addthis.com/) to let everyone know what’s going on during this move.

Thanks in advance for your patience and for using AddThis!

Viral Click Tracking for All

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AddThis click tracking is a powerful feature that allows you to measure the amount of traffic and viral lift you get from social sharing. By appending a tag to your shared URLs we can tell you which social networks send you the most clicks and what content is most viral. Click tracking is hugely popular and has been deployed by over half of our users since launch a year ago.

Soon, we’ll be rolling out click tracking as a default feature for all users (you may already be using it). You don’t have to do anything to turn it on and you’ll start seeing click and viral lift data in your analytics dashboard. We’re going to use this data to provide you with more detailed traffic source reporting in the near future. Click tracking data is also used to optimize your content feeds which help recirculate traffic within your site.

clicks

To learn more about how click tracking works, including how to turn it off, take a look at the click tracking docs.

Happy sharing and please visit our forum if you have any questions.

Making AddThis More Accessible

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Most times when we announce a new feature or improvement, we invite you to take a look. This isn’t one of those times. Instead, this feature announcement is about listening and touching AddThis. We have updated our code to work better with keyboard navigation and screen readers. Now when you visit a site that is using AddThis, you can tab through all of the available sharing options. If you choose to see more options, you can easily filter the list of services and then tab to the one you like. We’ve also added focus styling so if you are navigating with a keyboard, you’ll have a better idea where you are. Also, if you are using a screen reader, you should properly hear the name of the service.

If you’re a publisher you might be asking yourself, “How do I make this available to my users?” It’s easy, we’ve enabled this for everyone. Your site’s visitors are now even more able to share whatever they like, wherever they like.

The key highlights of what we did:

  • Toolboxes are keyboard navable
  • Toolboxes are marked up so screen readers can use them all
  • The expanded menu is keyboard navable and closable with the esc key
  • Graphs and maps in analytics have alternatives for screen readers

At AddThis, all of our users are important to us and we believe it should be as easy as possible for users to share content from their favorite publishers. This is just one step in our continuous journey to make AddThis as great as we can. We have been able to get some feedback from Russell Heimlich and other accessibility experts to help make this happen. If you have ideas or suggestions on how we can give you a high quality experience with AddThis, please get in touch!

Heads Up Publishers, UK Changing Policies Around Cookies

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New rules governing the use of website “cookies” were issued by the United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), effective May 26, 2011. These new rules require web publishers to enable users to “opt-in” to the use of cookies for purposes such as tracking, etc.  There is a 12 month transition period (ending May 26, 2012) for companies to meet the new requirements.  During that period, companies have to take steps to comply with this new regulation although complete compliance is not required before May 26, 2012.

The new UK rules apply to all websites hosted in Europe and websites hosted elsewhere if they target UK residents.  U.S. websites that market their sites to UK residents or that have a large number of UK users may be subject to the new rules and be required to comply.

The AddThis toolset does use cookies to enable some aspects of the service, such as menu personalization and content analytics.  Though the legal requirements don’t specify any specific steps required over the course of the next year, we’ve already been evaluating different ways to make sure that if your website falls under the jurisdiction of the UK regulations, we can help you be fully compliant while using AddThis.  Expect updates via this blog and our support forums as we roll out configuration features to support the opt-in capabilities, and if you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

[NEW] AddThis for IOS Apps, Mobile Websites. Sign-up for Android Beta.

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AddThis is making it easy to add sharing and analytics to your Apple iOS application, mobile website, and – soon – your Android App . All of the great features and deep analytics we offer you today for browser-based web pages, we now give you for your native mobile applications and mobile web pages.

Our iOS SDK makes incorporating sharing into your application a snap. In a few simple steps you will be able to enable, customize, and track social sharing in your application. We give you access to hundreds of sharing services just as we do for the web, so if you want to give your users the option to share to Stumbleupon, Reddit and of course Facebook and Twitter, the SDK will make it very easy.

Want to update your mobile website to support sharing? If you are using AddThis today, you don’t have to do a thing. We have optimized AddThis so it displays properly and responds properly to touch inputs in mobile browsers on iOS and Android. If you don’t have sharing on your mobile site, no problem – get the code here – it works everywhere.

For developers interested in putting AddThis into their native Android applications, we are working quickly to provide an awesome solution in the near future. If you are interested in beta testing our Android SDK, sign up at http://www.addthis.com/mobile.

Social Data in Real-time with AddThis Live View

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The future of data is real-time, and here at AddThis we are happy to say that the future is now.

The AddThis Live View is our first foray into presenting shares, clicks and even geographical data in real-time. You are now able to see where shares are being sent, as well as from which services traffic is returning to your site. You can even see live data from Address Bar sharing – visitors copying and pasting your URLs from their browser’s address bar into emails and IM conversations.

Using the Live View

There are several different ways to use your Live View report.

  1. As a feed, showing you the shares and clicks as they come in.
  2. Using our Scoreboard view, which rolls the content performing the best to the top of the list.
  3. In a stand alone window that pops out from your regular browser view.
  4. With the geographical map, which pops up shares and clicks in the region they occur! (Zoom in for even more accurate location.)

 

Share Your Live View with the Team

Why not let the whole team know what’s happening on your site? Some publishers are projecting their Live Views in their newsroom to give an up-to-the-minute view of what content is resonating with their users. Their teams can then make up-to-the-minute editorial decisions based on how their pages are being socialized.

 

Any feedback on the Live View? Ideas for views or data you’d like to see real-time? Please post in the comments or email us!

AddThis for WordPress Now Supports Address Bar Sharing

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The AddThis WordPress Plugin now allows you to easily track Address Bar sharing. When activated, we now allow you to track and see how people are sharing your site when they copy the URL and paste it in an e-mail, instant message or anywhere else. To activate it, upgrade to the latest version of the plugin and check out the Advanced Tab.

Address Bar Sharing currently works in Firefox 4 and Safari 5. We also added Real Time Social Analytics as well.

We also have tested the plugin with the WordPress 3.2 Release Candidate and everything looks good.

If you notice any problems, make sure to head on over to the AddThis forum.

[New] Track Copy and Paste Shares Using Address Bar Analytics, Get Real-time Perspective with Live View

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We’re introducing several new features that make AddThis the first sharing platform to enable you to see all sharing activity occurring from your site in real-time. 

AddThis Analytics enable you to track how sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Email and other services impact your traffic.  To date, our analytics covered sharing occurring solely through our tools.  Today, however, we now give you the ability to track one of the biggest sources of shares – URL’s that are cut and pasted from the address bar – using Address Bar sharing analytics.

Address Bar sharing analytics give you the ability to track URLs that have been sent via emails, IMs and to forums using copy/paste. This captures a whole new segment of sharing that we have found to be up to 10x that of using social buttons. You now get a larger picture of where your direct traffic is coming from and how your users are really sharing your content.

We’ve also launched a Live View dashboard, which displays shares and clicks as they are happening. You can even open up a map to see our Geo Live View, showing shares and clicks popping up in the geographical location that they are happening!

With these new tools, you will gain even greater insight into what content is resonating with your users as well as gauge when and how certain articles gain traction. You can start making real-time editorial decisions to maximize your users’ engagement. Try them out and find out why partners like ‘USA Today’ are excited to use these tools.

We’ve also launched the ability to track activity from native Facebook Like, Twitter tweet and Google +1 buttons.  This is just the beginning of a larger analytics and data API push – stay tuned.

Check out this video for more information:

Or read the press release here.

AddThis Now Supports the Google +1 Button

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Today we are excited to be a launch partner for Google’s +1 button for
websites. As the largest sharing network, we clearly understand how to
process social sharing data at massive scale. Publishers now have the option
to easily install the +1 button via AddThis.com, our WordPress Plugin, and
our client API.

Once you’ve installed our code on your site, analytics on the efficacy of
the +1 button will start showing immediately via your analytics dashboard.
These analytics will be integrated with your other social sharing analytics
to give you a complete view into the performance of your content.

The +1 button helps your content stand out in Google search results by
giving your visitors the ability to recommend your content to others quickly
and easily. The more chances you give your users to +1 your content, the
more likely your URLs show up in search results with +1 annotations, thus
helping users discover results recommended by their friends and other
contacts.

Learn how to get +1 for your website by visiting the +1 features page.

Problems with Sharing to Twitter

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11:18am EST – We have deployed a fix.  Sharing to Twitter should be working fine again.  Let us know if you’re finding any issues.

9:20am EST – Good morning, we’re getting reports from users that they are having problems with sharing to Twitter. Our team is investigating. We’ll report back soon with more information.