The AddThis Blog

Today, I’m really excited to announce that we’re launching the capability for publishers to see how many clickbacks are driven after each share coming from AddThis and it’s super easy to enable.

With the AddThis platform, once we saw how we could make it easy to share content to every corner of the Social Web, we wanted to figure out how much traffic each share was driving back. This number represents the value of a share.

We’ve seen different companies try and tackle this problem different ways. We decided to do it by appending an URL parameter onto the end of an URL, when it’s shared.

Example – http://addthis.com/?sms_ss=twitter

When the page loads, the AddThis button on the page will recognize that the user viewing the page is coming from a share that came from AddThis. Everything gets reported in your analytics. By the way, we’re going to be evolving our reporting of clickbacks, so stay tuned.

Because this feature includes us appending an URL parameter to your URL, getting clickback analytics is opt-in.  You have to add this line of code to your AddThis button code.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var addthis_config = {
ui_track_linkback: true
}
</script>

A handful of partners got a sneak peak at this feature and implemented it early.  It generated some pretty interesting preliminary data.

• Niche and international social news sites like Reddit, Y Combinator’s Hacker News, Dutch social news site Nujij and Polish social news site Wykop drove the highest number of clickbacks
• Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter generated around the platform average number of clickbacks
• Reddit drove 2.5x as many clickbacks as Facebook, with Hacker News at 2.4x more,  Wykop at 35x more, and gaming social news site N4G (http://www.n4g.com/) at 6x more.
• Delicious, Google Bookmarks, and Google Reader shares drew the lowest level of clickbacks

As more publishers turn on this capability, we’re excited to see these stats evolve.

This is a feature that we’re super excited about and would especially like your feedback.  Let us know what you think.

Over the last few months, our Web team has been hard at work, designing and building the next version of the AddThis website. Today, I’m SO excited to unveil it to you today.

With this redesign, we expanded our analytics. We hope that you’ll find it even easier to discover and utilize all that the AddThis sharing platform is capable of accomplishing.

Let me give you a brief tour of some of the redesign and analytics changes we introduced.

We added a box to the home page that’ll show you some of your analytics, when you’re logged in. We’re also surfacing some overall platform trends right on the home page.

We’ve completely refreshed the home page for your analytics. We’ve also added clickback tracking, which I’ve written a whole post about.

You’ve been asking about being able drill down to a specific URL and see the specific analytics stats for it. Well, here it is.

We didn’t stop there. You now also drill down to a specific service and see stats about it.

That’s the big stuff.  Make sure that you check our post about clickback analytics, this is a cool feature that you won’t wanna miss out on.

As always, we covet your thoughts and feedback. Let us know what you think.

Today I’m excited to unveil version 2.0 of the AddThis Service Directory.

Ever since we launched version 1.0, I’ve been in love with its ability to help track the pulse of the Social Web. Since then, we’ve been experimenting with ways that we could show even more. With today’s launch, we’ve made it easier to see how people are sharing all over the world.

Right on the first page, you can see which services have the most shares, how services have been trending over the last month and their percentage of the overall sharing. You can also get insights into particular categories of services, like social networks or blogging sites, or even zoom into a particular service and see more information about its rankings and daily performance over the last month.

We’ve improved comparing countries as well. Now, you can compare up to three countries at a time, and see how sharing in each country has trended over time. As before, you can also compare which services are most popular. Did you know that in Brazil, Orkut is the #1 sharing service, and Facebook is only #5?

For those of you who really follow the Web and social media space, we hope that this can become a resource for you to see how people are sharing with all the great services and tools that are available today. We’re confident that over time the AddThis Service Directory is going to yield all kinds of fascinating new insights into how people use the Social Web.

If you have any feedback or thoughts about how we can make this even better, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. Drop us a comment or e-mail me at – justin@addthis.com.

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

  download daybreakers movie

  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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Today, we’re excited to announce that the AddThis sharing platform now supports link sharing to the popular social network Orkut.

Started as a project of Google back in 2004, Orkut has grown into a really popular social network, with major audiences coming from places like Brazil and India.

We’re very excited to have them join the other 198 link sharing services currently in the Service Directory. Are there any other services for AddThis that we should support but we aren’t currently? Let us know about this service.

We weren’t kidding when we said we want to make it easy for anyone to share the content that they love anywhere on the Web. Yesterday, we added 30 new link sharing services to the AddThis Service Directory. It brings the total up to 198.

Among the new services you’ll see everything from Koornk to Read It Later to meinVZ to Scoop.at to Aviary Capture to Blip.pl and go-testmany others.

Recently, we’ve been swamped with requests for new services. We’re moving through them, approving, and releasing them as fast as possible. For those that we haven’t gotten to yet, we appreciate your patience.

If there is a site we don’t support, please let us know about it. Check out our recently redesigned AddThis Service Directory submission page.