So… what do Grammy award winning music group The Gorillaz and Team USA for this year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver have in common? They both use the AddThis sharing platform to make their widgets shareable. (Shown below.)

Our mission with the AddThis platform is to make it easy for anyone to share anything, anywhere. Whether your users are enjoying your website, widgets, or anything really, they should be able to share it to every corner of the Social Web. We’re building out our platform and tools to make that happen.

Looking to incorporate AddThis into your own widgets? Have you seen the Flash examples and code samples that we’ve put together?

Here are the widgets…

Here at World HQ, we were very flattered to find out that AddThis is being highlighted in two social media marketing books. One just became available and the other will be coming to a bookstore near you this spring.

First, there’s “Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections” by Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt, which is available now. I just received a copy, and I’m really looking forward to reading it. I’m a HUGE believer in blogging within business. It’s allowed us to all stay in touch. *smiles*

Secondly, there’s “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Social Media Marketing“, which is written by Jennifer Abernerthy. This book won’t be available until early April 2010 but you can pre-order it on Amazon today. From what I hear, it’s going to be pretty awesome, especially if you’re new to social media marketing.

As we continue to evolve and push our platform and tools to new levels, we’re excited to be a standard part of the social media process and conversation.

If you ever have any feedback about how we can serve you better, don’t hesitate to e-mail me - justin@addthis.com. Thanks!

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

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  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.

One of the most popular ways to make your Web site and widgets shareable is the AddThis Toolbox introduced earlier this year. Publishers and users love having one-click access to any of the hundreds of available services.

But with such great diversity, we’ve heard from publishers that it can be a problem to choose the right handful of services. We thought so, too. Back in late September, we announced user-level personalization of the AddThis Menu based on the users browser locale and previous share history. This helps us to surface the most relevant services to your users when they want them.

Today we’re adding that power to Toolbox through the AddThis Menu API. The same technology which learns from your past sharing history to personalize the Menu now lets you personalize the services that are displayed within the AddThis Toolbox.

Displaying the right services at the right time to the right user helps your users share your content. Take a look at it and let us know what you think.download avatar movie

With so many possibilities in the AddThis platform for helping Web sites become more social and shareable, we need your opinion! Stop by the forum to share your thoughts and ideas!

We’re really psyched to be adding an additional 26 services to the AddThis Service Directory. You and your users can start sharing to these services using interfaces like the AddThis Menu and AddThis Toolbox, starting today.

Pop the menu to share to: Adifni, aero, Box.net, Camyoo, Cirip, ClassicalPlace, Clickazoo, COSMiQ, Digo, Dipdive, eLert Gadget, Farkinda, Favable, Flaker, Friendster, Hedgehogs, Hot Bookmark, Instapaper, Livefavoris, Sekoman, Spruzer, Surfpeople, Yazzem, Youbookmarks, and WireFan, as well as hundreds of other services.

Or perhaps you want to share with a friend via e-mail, but you miss the comfort of your favorite e-mail app? Starting today, you can share through your desktop e-mail client–like Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc–instead of our e-mail form.

All in all this puts us up to 233 services that are supported by the AddThis platform. If there’s anything that we’re missing in the AddThis Service Directory, we want to know about. Please submit those services. For those of you who have submitted a service but haven’t heard back yet, we really appreciate your patience as we work our way through the queue.

As the universal sharing platform for the Web, we’re excited to continue moving AddThis in the direction where we enable anyone to share anything anywhere. Over the coming months, we’re looking to add new services that allow people to share more Web sites and widgets into their favorite communities, no matter the size.

Today, I’m really excited to announce the launch of AddThis Labs. Over the last year, AddThis has started a new chapter of its life. It’s evolved from a mere button on a few pages to become the Web’s universal sharing platform, seen by over 600 million people every month (hailing from countries all across the world!), on a menagerie of 550,000 Web sites. Given that level of diversity, it only makes sense that we’ve been running some experiments and listening to our users. AddThis Labs is all about opening that process up even further.

Our first Labs project is the AddThis Sharebar. Sharebar is a great example of the flexibility of our APIs; it uses the Sharing Endpoints to create a completely new on-page interface for sharing online content. We’re excited to see how new interfaces like the Sharebar will change how users interact with a page and the 207 services that we’ve integrated into the AddThis platform.

Secondly, we’re launching AddThis iPhone-Optimized Analytics. Using some of our more avatar movie elaborate internal Analytics APIs, we revisualized the data specifically for the iPhone, so you can keep track of how your content is getting shared while you’re on the go. Try it out by typing addthis.com/iphone into Safari on your iPhone.

If you play with any of the Labs projects, stop by the forum. We’d love to hear your feedback. We see a lot of possibilities in the AddThis platform: these two projects came out of a single hackathon! But while we place a high value on innovation–and there’s crazier stuff to come–but the end goal is improving things for you, our users. We need your comments and ideas to make that happen.

Over the coming months, we’re going to be releasing more of our internal projects and experiments into AddThis Labs. Check back often for more exciting examples of cool and innovative ways that you can harness the power of the AddThis platform.

Today, we are happy to announce that AddThis now supports widget, or embeddable-content, sharing in addition to Web page sharing. Clearspring created the first widget-sharing platform, Launchpad. We have taken the best features from Launchpad and are making them available via AddThis. The result is a faster-loading, easier-to-implement platform that can share and track both widgets and Web pages. And best of all, it’s free!

In fall 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, the number one bookmarking and sharing service for Web pages. Our vision was to establish a universal sharing platform for the Web – a single platform empowering online publishers and advertisers to enable their users to share any content (widgets, Web pages, etc.) with anyone, anywhere.

It is so exciting to be taking such a big leap toward that vision. AddThis is our universal sharing platform.

Over the next several months, Launchpad users will be joining the AddThis Community. As they do so, we will continue to improve our ability to share widget content with more destinations, analytics and other great features.

It’s been a tremendous year. AddThis now reaches over 600 million users across the world, up from just 200 million last year. We now support over 200 total services and 50 languages, all with the help of our amazing community.

Thank you for your continued support. We’re excited to see what the next year will bring.

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Monday, after the long Thanksgiving break, we all slogged back to work and while at work, started to buy online all the new toys and gizmos that we want to give and get this holiday season. Yes, it was Cyber Monday.

Well, we looked at 15 of the top e-commerce sites that use AddThis to see if there was any interesting data that popped up. We found a few interesting nuggets…

• From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, there was a 78% increase in sharing on those e-commerce sites.
• The top 5 services for those e-commerce sites were E-mail, Facebook, Print, Google Bookmarks, and Delicious.
• From the previous Monday to Cyber Monday, e-commerce related services like Amazon Wishlist and Kaboodle both saw ~20-25% increases in usage.
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We’re going to continue to keep an eye on this as the holiday season progresses. We’ll let you know what we see.