At AddThis, our vision is to empower publishers to enable their users to share anything, to anyone, anywhere. Today, we are realizing a big part of that vision.
Over the last year, the number of requests we have received for additional services grew faster than ever before. As we manually added support for more sharing destinations, the expanded list of services became so long that it was getting harder for users to find the services they used most often.
Today, we’re introducing the first community-driven platform to take advantage of this demand, which enables content to be shared by users to any destination on the web. This platform has two components – an open Service Directory and smart menu technology.
The Service Directory is a self-serve system enabling 3rd parties like Posterous, Hyves or the even the next Twitter to make their service available to the millions of AddThis users around the Web. All it takes is a few minutes to fill out a simple web form. We’ve had this feature available in private beta for over a month, and in that short time we’ve already added 100
new services. Our hope is that with the help of our community, we can support sharing to every social network, social bookmarking or social media site – big or small. We believe that people should be able to share to their communities, wherever they are.
Also, as of today we’ve introduced a new sharing menu optimization technology that personalizes the experience of each of the 534MM users that AddThis touches on a monthly basis. We leverage a number of parameters to deliver this experience such as a user’s sharing history and browser language. For example, if a user has previously shared to Hyves using AddThis, Hyves will now be highlighted in that user’s AddThis menu — everywhere.
Additionally with this release, we’re launching support for over 30 new languages. These languages were submitted as part of the community translation program that we kicked off back in April. Now users can enjoy the power of sharing with AddThis in 50 languages.
The Service Directory and smart menu technology, coupled with the Language Database, make AddThis the first open platform empowering users to share the content they love, anywhere in the world. We are excited about where our community will take these tools. Thank you for your continued support.