Today, we’ve released a new workflow for submitting new services (i.e. social networks, online communities, etc) to the AddThis Service Directory that requires all new services support the sharing protocol OExchange.
OExchange has a new Best Practices Guide for service providers, it has some suggestions for avoiding common UX and functional bugs we’ve seen on sharing sites over the years:
These are great tips for any sharing site, they’ll improve the user experience and make it easier to share. The guide also shows you how to you test your site using the OExchange tools, check it out:
http://www.oexchange.org/tools/bestpractices/
We’re going to roll out improved Service Directory support for OExchange-compatible services in the next month or so, stay tuned!
Announced last week, we’re pleased to be leading the development of an open protocol for content sharing on the web, OExchange. We’re also actively working OExchange support into our products in a number of ways. Here’s an update on a few of them.
OExchange-compliant proxy endpoints.
The AddThis Sharing Endpoints are themselves OExchange Offer endpoints. In other words, you can use our back-end to send content to any service that AddThis is integrated with, just by using a service-named endpoint like this:
http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/<service>/offer?url=http://www.example.com
This means AddThis makes almost 300 different services on the web into fully compliant OExchange targets!
Read more about this in the API documentation.