The AddThis Blog

Sharing is at the center of how we discover new and relevant content online. Our goal is to allow anyone to share anything to anyone at any time.

With this in mind, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make sharing with AddThis universally accessible, including by people with disabilities. Because we are so widely used by the federal government, complying with the Section 508 guidelines for Web sites was the first goal.

A week or so ago we published a new version of the AddThis code which moved us towards this goal. We found that, while it made things more accessible to people with disabilities, it also made AddThis more accessible to a slew of bots.

Bots were mercilessly hitting AddThis and causing all these shares to be triggered that aren’t actual shares. It inflated our internal numbers. We saw some sites that were getting as much as a 25% artificial bump in shares.

So… we’re currently working on a set of filters that’ll take out the artificial shares caused by the bots. In the meantime, we’re going to revert to the older AddThis code that doesn’t allow this to happen. This may mean that some of you may see a drop in your number of shares.

If you have any questions about this, drop a comment on this post or drop me an e-mail. – justin@addthis.com

Hey guys, as we’ve mentioned before, we’re constantly looking to test ways that we can improve the sharing experience so that we can get you more shares.

One example that we’ve talked about is the difference between having the compact menu appear on hover versus on click. When we tested it, we found that having the compact menu appear on hover gives a MUCH higher share rate. So… of course, we went with on hover.

Well, we have a few more very small user interface tweaks to the compact menu that we’d like to test. They’re pretty minor changes. We’re only going to show the tweaks on a very very very small percentage of menu views. It’s just enough to let us know whether or not the changes will move the needle for you guys.

If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. As I said, our goal is to get you guys more shares. We’re all a team in this effort. My e-mail address is – justin@addthis.com

On Wednesday, we had a release for AddThis and pushed some interesting new tools. Here’s the rundown…

There is now an optimized version of AddThis for the iPhone. So… when you’re surfing around the Web on your iPhone and want to share the page you’re on using its AddThis button, click on it, a new tab will open, and you’ll see all the same sharing features but optimized to take advantage of the great things the iPhone offers.

In this release, we also published official AddThis extensions for Joomla. Now it’s never been easier to install the AddThis button throughout your entire Joomla Web site.

We’re slowly working to create plug-ins for every content management system and blogging platform we can find. All of you WordPress users, you’ve seen our WordPress plug-in, right? Expect more announcements about plug-ins/extension soon.

If you have any questions about these updates, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. We’d love

to help. E-mail me – justin@addthis.com

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we like to have a little bit of fun here at AddThis. Yesterday, we installed a pull up bar in our office. Our CTO Stewart the hangover movieAllen and our Product Manager Cyrus Radfar decided to test their strength. I’m very pleased to report that we’re very strong here at AddThis.

Here at AddThis, we love it when we see that someone has taken our technology and done something with it that we hadn’t seen before. We were excited when we stumbled across the online design gallery FormFiftyFive and saw how they implemented AddThis. We thought download transformers revenge of the fallen onlineit was pretty sexy, different looking, and worth a quick highlight here on the blog.

Have you seen some different integrations of AddThis? Send them over. – justin@addthis.com

Every day I’m talking to customers who are evaluating the different tools available for making their content shareable. A common question is “How is AddThis doing in comparison to everyone else?”

A common tool for measuring traffic to a Web site is something like Compete. You put in a domain name and it will tell you how many unique visitors that domain has gotten last month. This is a great way to find out how many people went to the Web site AddThis.com but this is NOT a good way to find out how many people are using the AddThis button on their many different Web sites with different URLs.

If you want to judge how often the AddThis button is getting placed on a publisher’s Web site, we recommend checking out something like comScore’s Extended Web Metrix. This will tell you how many people saw a Web page with a piece of our sharing technology built into it.

Last month, we announced here on this blog that, according to the last comScore Extended Web Metrix report, we reach over half a billion people every month and almost half of everyone on the world wide Internet. As we get new interesting data like this from comScore, we’ll make sure to pass it on to you right here on the blog.

This morning, during an update of AddThis, we inadvertently overloaded our main data center, completely bringing down our website and ability to share. The menu and the button continued to load smoothly, as they are loaded off the CDN. For more information, check out the forum post.

We sincerely apologize for the outage. We’re especially bummed about it because it’s our first platform wide outage in over a year. We’re committed to giving you the best performing sharing tools on the Web and have put controls in place so we can prevent this type of thing moving forward.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@addthis.com