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.

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.

Within Google Buzz, just make sure that Google Reader is listed as one of your “Connected Sites”. Then, when you share to Google Readerthat link will show up in your Google Buzz feed. It’s that easy.

This means that you’ll be able to share articles to Google Buzz from any of the over 600,000 websites that have integrated AddThis. There’s no need to add an extra button to your page. If you have AddThis, you’re ready to go.

You could also share to Google Reader and thus Google Buzz from our Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome browser extensions.

In the meantime, we’re looking into ways that we can more directly integrate. We’ll report back when we have more information.

A couple of weeks ago we launched an update to our AddThis browser extensions for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. For Firefox users, this update introduced the option of sharing with AddThis using a browser toolbar.

Like most of us in the office, I love sharing links with friends and posting them to my favorite online services. With the new AddThis Toolbar, I can do it all with just one click. It’s pretty awesome.

Well, after a few weeks of these new browser extensions being out in the world, we’re excited to report that they have been a big success. For Firefox users specifically, we’ve seen a 3x increase in sharing from the previous version of the add-on. Plus, someone with the new AddThis toolbar shares 39x more often than the average AddThis user.

Website publishers, this is great for you. When people share more often, that means they’re sharing your content more often and your content is getting exposed to even more new users.

As we’ve said before, our goal is to make it easy for anyone to share anything, anywhere. We’re excited to evolve these sharing tools and make them even better. Stay tuned!

Have questions about the AddThis Toolbar? Check out our FAQ, drop a comment on this post, or e-mail me at justin@addthis.com.

Do you use one of the many other browsers? Well, we love you, too. Have you seen AddThis for Chrome or the AddThis Bookmarklets?

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…

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!

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!

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!

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.