Web Intents Support

Want to add Web Intent support to your site? If you use AddThis, you already do. Just drop this line into your addthis_toolbox:

<a class=”addthis_button_intent_share_url”></a>

Web Intents users will be able to share your page through their favorite intent handler just like any other service.

Intents support for non-Chrome users

Web Intents are great for Chrome users, but what about the other two-thirds of visitors? AddThis provides another one-liner to make web intents work no matter what. Set:

addthis_config.webintents = true;

and AddThis will handle Intent events in the absence of native support. Implement Web Intents however you like—in the AddThis toolbox or not—and rest assured that your visitors will have access to their preferred service.

The AddThis Intent Handler

For those of you testing out your brand-spanking-new Chrome installs, remember that not all of your favorite services have an intent handler in the Chrome Web Store yet. Not to worry—AddThis does! Install it as you would a normal Chrome extension and give it a spin on a demo intent.

Watch this Space

As Web Intents grows, so will our support for it. Meanwhile, we’re developing tools to enable OExchange providers to handle Web Intents and integrating intent handling into our browser extensions.

Web Intents is a new tool in your sharing arsenal, and AddThis is thrilled to support it! Your feedback on our Web Intents support is invaluable, both now and in the coming months as your implementation of intents evolves alongside Web Intents itself.

What is it?

The Trending content box is built on top of AddThis’ powerful data processing capabilities to surface the top social traffic from across your site in a simple to install plugin.  When a visitor finishes reading content (or loses focus), they ask to themselves, “Ooo, what’s this?” unable to resist the top trending article on Facebook you created a few days ago.
What’s that?  It’s customizable, too?

Of course, we know nothing on the web is one size fits all, so as we do with all of our tools, we made the Trending content box completely customizable. You can jazz it up with your own design, choose the number of links to show, even set the date range of content displayed. We highly encourage you to get after it!

One of the best parts about the Trending content box is that if you own multiple sites you can cross promote the top social content from these sites.  

Other ideas for using your new favorite feature

Looking to increase engagement from off your domain?  Check out our API to embed your top social content into things like:

• Your email newsletter
• A Facebook brand page
• Inside your native mobile application

Where there’s AddThis, there’s data

No matter where you integrate the Trending content box, there is a new module in your analytics dashboard that shows you how many additional pageviews this plugin is generating for you. What? Did you think we would give you an awesome new tool and not give you analytics to track against it? Give us more credit than that!

So don’t just sit there watching your exit rate with a sad face. Get your very own (or one we designed for you!) Trending content box for your site here.

One day, your blog is linked on the front page of the New York Times. You’re suddenly getting thousands of hits an hour, way more than you normally get in a week. Most of those visitors read your post and leave; a few might be motivated to poke around your archives, or subscribe to your feed. Although the spike looks awesome in Google Analytics, it doesn’t earn you anything commensurate with the traffic volume. If there was a way to easily detect these new visitors and encourage them to do something useful, you could turn a lucky break into lasting value.

We had this problem. That’s why we’ve created the Welcome bar.

Disclaimer: Only an image. Were this a real Welcome bar, you’d probably click on it.

It welcomes your users by appearing at the top of your site and asking them to perform a single action—to share this content on their favorite site, to follow you on your social network of choice, or to visit another page. In our testing thus far, we’ve found that conversion rates for personalized, targeted calls to action like this are orders of magnitude more effective than normal on-page sharing tools, by pageview.

What makes our Welcome bar different from other social bars is that it’s built on our awesome data APIs. You can leverage what we know about our 1.3 billion users across our network of millions of sites to customize your calls to action to achieve specific goals–like getting your content shared, increasing your follow count, increasing sales, and more.

Let’s take that New York Times example. The Welcome bar makes it easy to set up different rules for different scenarios. You might want to thank everyone from the Times and also invite them to retweet the article if they’re into Twitter. If they’re not a Twitter user, you can direct them to your newsletter subscription form.

The Twitter users could see this:

…while everyone else sees this:

On the backend, you get a simple module in your analytics console showing how many times we’ve shown the bar to a matched user, and of those sessions, how many times the user’s taken the suggested action:

As you can see, the New York Times has not linked to my blog. Yet!

That way you can justify the ROI of taking over 35 prime pixels. (And you can always style the bar using your own CSS.)

To help make this more clear, here’s a live example. When you click that link, it’ll invite you to Tweet this blog post if you’re a Twitter user; if you’re not a Twitter user, you’ll be invited to return to the blog. If you reload the page, you’ll get a generic message inviting you to learn more about the bar. And if you happen to live in my neighborhood, I’ll invite you to a concert.

The Welcome bar API allows you to target hundreds of different user states. Want to show a promotion to users from a specific ZIP code? There’s an API for that. Want to show different messages to new versus returning users? There’s an API for that, too. We support targeting by time of day, preferred services, referring service, browser type, and more.

But you don’t need to be a JavaScript wizard to use the Welcome bar. Our simple configuration tool lets you define the visitors you want to target, configure the bar’s appearance and choose the action you want the visitor to take.

If there’re interesting conditions we haven’t added to the API yet, we’d love to hear about them! Our goal is to provide all the intelligence you need to target your users for simple calls to action. We’d also love know what other capabilities you’d like the bar to have, beyond sharing, following, and linking.

Just grab the Welcome bar code and see how easy it is to get started.

Questions? Comments? Send ‘em our way!

Have you gotten the most important lady in your life a gift yet? Or are you a typical procrastinator? Maybe you even forgot and this blog post is reminding you! Well, if that’s the case, we’ve got some great (and not-so great) gift ideas, all thanks to the AddThis data. Check it out …

• First, we have a tag cloud of the top social activity related to Mother’s Day from the first week of May:

(Click all images for larger version)

If we can make a suggestion, maybe don’t get her something that is solely “printable”. (Unless it’s a cute kid’s craft, then you get a pass.)

• The moms who raised planners (cough::overachievers) who were looking for gifts on May 1st might expect some of the following:

Unfortunately, they still raised some cheapskates with the terms “inexpensive” and “cheap gift ideas”. Or smart penny pinchers! It’s the thought that counts, right?

• Can you smell the roses already? Moms living in Virginia and Missouri should expect flowers more than the madres living in Oregon based on our geographic map of interest intensity. Maybe the Oregonians will get something more original, like a bouquet of cinnamon buns!

• Finally, odds are our favorite ladies are getting flowers that were purchased on Monday May 7th. Also, according to the data the flowers will be pink or yellow. Pretty!

In all seriousness, we love moms and we will be celebrating them this weekend. Go out and get her something nice because she deserves it!

Here’s a quick summary of the new stuff.

Welcome bar
The Welcome bar is all about optimizing your site for your incoming visitors. It lets you look at where your visitors are coming from, determines what type of visitor they are, and welcomes them with a specific call-to-action.  These calls-to-action are presented as a horizontal bar at the top of the page containing custom messages and action buttons.

These actions will help you optimize for specific goals such as increasing follower counts, growing registrations by rewarding loyalty, and more. For example, want to increase membership by offering a free trial to returning visitors? It’s easy.

As with all AddThis social plugins, you’ll get in-depth insights into how the Welcome bar is performing via a new module in your analytics summary.

Trending content box
When you use AddThis to power sharing for your site, our data-processing platform knows which content is working for you across your social channels.  The Trending content box is a customizable plugin that helps you surface this content to drive more traffic within your site.  Designed to fit seamlessly into your pages and automatically feature the most trending, popular, or network-specific content, the Trending content box helps to increase overall traffic and site retention.  Want to customize the look of your Trending content box? No problem – we’ve designed it to be completely configurable to match your site’s look-and-feel.

As for analytics, there’s a new module on the summary report that shows you how many additional pageviews this plugin is generating for you.

Like the Welcome bar, the Trending content box interface is fully-customizable via APIs — you can grab a great experience out of the box, or make it blend in seamlessly with the rest of your site.

Engagement Analytics
On top of the analytics we’ve added for the Welcome bar and Trending content box, you’ll notice something else the next time you log into your analytics console.  We’re now showing you copied-text data — key words and phrases your visitors are copying out of your pages. You can see which text is resonating, and which keywords might help you attract new visitors via SEO or potentially keep your visitors engaged longer.

AddThis now gives you the richest real-time view of your social lifecycle.  Building on our recently announced Follower reporting, and the full-lifecycle social analytics you already know and love (including our address bar tracking), this new copied-text reporting provides another piece of your social optimization puzzle.  And again, its not just about analytics — this data powers all of our social plugins.

We’ll be diving deeper into each of these new capabilities, and the ways in which you can use them to drive traffic and engagement, in followup posts over the coming week or two.  For now, check em out and let us know what you think!

AddThis is now used by 14 million sites, reaching 1.3 billion users monthly.   With your help, we’ve become the standard for social content sharing tools and analytics online.  The AddThis brand has come to represent social sharing, scale and simplicity.   AddThis represents where we are and where we’re going – creating a more personal and social web connecting publishers, advertisers and consumers.

AddThis powers the largest social and interest graph on the web.  The AddThis platform is loaded 3 billion times daily, generating 10 terabytes of data a day.  We’re on track to process 1 trillion page views this year alone.  We process this massive reach via our XGraph technology to map how people are connected by social ties, brand affiliation, and intent.  This real-time view of the web’s activity is incredibly powerful and puts us in a select class of companies like Facebook and Google.

AddThis’ mission is to deliver the power of this big social data back to you via easy-to-use products and services.  The audience targeting offering that we sold as Clearspring are a step towards our mission and is now available via AddThis as Social+ Audiences.  Using Social+ Audiences, advertisers and publishers can tap our social and intent graph to deliver personalized display ads to the right customers at the right time.

AddThis’ is taking another step towards our vision with our new social plugin and analytics suite.  This suite goes beyond sharing and enables site owners to engage social visitors with simple tools like follow, trending content, and welcome bar.  Like our sharing tools, these plugins are easy-to-install and come action-packed with real-time analytics.  And best of all, they are free.

Thank you to the 14 million customers that have helped get us where we are.  We’re excited to continue to serve you as AddThis!

Best,
Ramsey McGrory, CEO

There are 2 numbers to consider:

• Raw uniques – The raw number is really a count of all cookies, including bots and everything.
• Good UID – We use a “good UID,” a number that we know is lower than our actual reach, but better to be conservative.

Here’s how we get to our “good” UID:

• Start with time component:  We start with every cookie that has been seen at least twice over a period greater than 24 hours apart because we need to be sure that we do not include bots and consumers who constantly clear their caches.  The time component is crucial to an accurate count because there are many cases where transient consumers appear in the log files multiple times in a narrow time period but then disapear from the logs a short while later.  A filter that counts any consumer seen multiple times would count this activity incorrectly and cause the unique user count to be inflated.
• Count Unique Monthly Users: Then we take a de-duplicated count across all of the days in the month we are measuring to get the total count.  As we have discussed in another blog post, this is not a trivial task and it is tempting to take the easy way out and simply sum the total unique users by day in order to get the final unique user count.  Doing so would overestimate the actual number of unique users counted.
• Consider multiple devices: Unfortunately there is no reasonable way to detect when the same person uses multiple devices to access the internet, this is very common in the US and other westernized countries.  For this reason, we take the floor of our total unique user count to reduce the impact of overcounting multiple devices.

Even with our conservative counting approach, we’re proud to be on sites that reach 1.3B users on a monthly basis, making us the largest social sharing platform on the open web. We’d love your feedback and would be happy to expand on any aspect of our methodology.

What the heck is it?

Web Intents is an open specification being developed within the W3C process. It allows web pages to more easily and securely invoke external services on behalf of users. In plain English, this spec is a way for a web browser to help users connect to useful services on the web for performing certain common actions — things like save, share, and print.

For example, a web page can indicate that it contains some content a user might want to save. A user’s browser can detect that, help the user choose a suitable service, and then actually save the content. Same goes for printing, even for the most basic type of sharing — sending a URL to some other service.

You can learn more about Web Intents and what they can do at webintents.org or the W3C site.

How does AddThis work with Web Intents?

We’re announcing 3 things today. All of the bits are either already deployed or will be rolling out over the coming days.

1. AddThis sharing tools can invoke Web Intents.

AddThis social tools are the easiest way to integrate sharing functionality into your site. That’s not just true for deploying Pinterest, Facebook, or over 300 other services and custom interfaces — it’s also true for access to basic Web Intents. When a developer includes AddThis in a page, users immediately get access to any intent handlers that are registered with their browser. No handlers registered? That’s ok too, it won’t hurt anything and you’ll still get AddThis-powered sharing and analytics as usual.

2. AddThis makes Web Intents work, even if the browser doesn’t support them.

By adding AddThis to a page, a site developer can feel free to use Web Intents to initiate sharing actions. AddThis makes sure the handlers are there, and lets users invoke the tools and share content, even without any browser support. Site developers can relax and not worry about figuring out a complex matrix of browser support for their pages.

3. AddThis sharing tools can handle sharing actions.

If a page includes a share intent, AddThis can handle it. End users can share content to any of our 300+ services. AddThis ensures that web intents retains all the flexibility of current sharing tools from day one.

What next?

We’re extremely excited to help take another step toward open sharing by supporting and participating in the work on this emerging specification. We’ll be continuing to add support to our products and talking more about implementation details here and in our docs. We’ll also be talking quite a bit more about Web Intents to users, site operators, and the over 300 service providers we’ve integrated with across the globe. We’ll be releasing tools to make Web Intents support easier and more valuable for all of them.

The more progress the web is able to make on the mechanics of sending content from point A to point B, the more AddThis can stay focused on the optimization, analytics, and unique social experiences that you’ve come to expect from us and our tools. Check back on this blog to stay up-to-date on our support and ongoing product enhancements around Web Intents.

To the Open Web,

Team AddThis

Replace the URL of the image the pin is on, and place this within the <HEAD></HEAD> of the page:

<meta property="og:image" content="http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/IMAGE.jpg"/>

You might even have this line of code already on each page of your site. This open graph tag is used by multiple services, including Pinterest and Facebook, to display an image with the shared content.

We recently discussed the popularity of Pinterest and since, the service has continued to grow. Because we are so enthusiastic about everyone’s penchant for pinning, here are some fun facts from the AddThis network:

• Content is shared to Pinterest (11%) via mobile devices more than Facebook (7%) and Twitter (9%)
• Almost 35% of all content shared to Pinterest via AddThis is food. NOM!
• The US, UK, Canada and Australia are all the most socially engaged countries on Pinterest

Dont forget, we also support the Pinterest “Pin It” button, if that’s your preferred implementation. One of the biggest advantages of leveraging the AddThis Pinterest sharing tools is the great insights you will gain through our analytics about how your users are “pinning” your content.

Now get back to your boards, people.

Merchants on Shopify get access to over 300 social channels including Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter in addition to real-time analytics showing how socially viral their products are. This real-time data can help you increase traffic and engagement to your store resulting in increased sales.

AddThis for Shopify has even been featured 10 helpful new Shopify Apps. Let us know if we can do anything to make AddThis work even better on your Shopify store.

A few fun tidbits:

• 7% of social actions measured through AddThis’s sharing tools are people printing.
• In the United States, 11% of actions measured through AddThis are people printing.
• The French print twice as much as the rest of the world.
• Also getting a failing grade is Sweden – the Swedish are printing 20% of the time.
• The most environmentally friendly social countries are Brazil, India, Turkey.
• Mexico, Spain and Italy are just a few of the countries that print 7% of the time through our sharing tools.

Sharing to social networks is environmentally caring as it reduces the need to produce as much physical content, which then reduces waste.

We also saw a 200% increase in interest for the term “Earth Day” on the actual day of the celebration, April 22. There was also a small spike on Friday, April 20 due to a high volume of articles being published about weekend activities surrounding the “holiday”.

As with all our tools, we want to give you insight into how the buttons are performing, so make sure you sign up for the AddThis analytics to see which channels your users are going to and even more than that – which pages on your site are actually generating the followers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to head to our support page and we’ll help you get some answers.

What is Text Copy Tracking?
Text Copy Tracking captures the text users copy to their clipboards from your site. We do not track what users do with these copied keywords, but it is likely that many are put into a search engine. These keywords should give you a better idea of your audience’s specific interests and reveal opportunities to keep users engaged with your site.  For privacy reasons, we omit any copies that appear to be a URL, an email address, or a phone number. You can use it on any page, but it will only be active for site visitors who are using a supported browser.

Do I need to upgrade my AddThis code to get text copy tracking?
No, we will push this change automatically; all you have to do is sit back and start watching your analytics live view.  If you want to turn off text copy tracking, you will have to update to the latest AddThis code.

What happens if I want to turn off copy text tracking?
We understand some users may not want this feature–so you can easily disable text copy tracking.  To do so, edit your AddThis code to set the data_track_textcopy property to false on the addthis_config object.  You can get more details here.

As always feedback is appreciated via comments below.

We took a look at our data and it was clear that a lot of activity was happening. Check out this map:

It is clear by the high intensity of interest in the Virginia and surrounding DC area that the in-person images of the shuttle arriving at its final destination evoked a lot of excitement!

Credit: Tom Oettinger

The AddThis data reflects the buzz around the ship, seeing spikes in interest on both Saturday and Sunday – the anniversary of Titanic hitting the iceberg and then sinking, respectively. It also brings to mind the channels in which the tales are being shared – through social mediums still decades away from being discovered in 1912.

• We saw a spike Tuesday on 100th anniversary of the launch of the Titanic and due to a number of television specials about the famous voyage. Overall we had a great spike of >100% over the weekend.

• Facebook dominated as the service to deliver and receive articles about the Titanic. Stories ranged from tales of survival and heroism about those aboard the fated ship to recent scientific theories in how she actually went down.

• The map shows the geographic interest intensity for the United States. Rhode Island most likely appears dark because of this popular story about two pro tennis players, Richard Norris Williams II and Karl Howell Behr, who both survived the sinking and went on to play against each other. The Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum located in Newport had a ”Tennis and the Titanic” exhibit as a tribute to Hall of Famers.

To better understand the challenge of determining the cardinality of large sets let’s imagine that you have a 16 character ID and you’d like to count the number of distinct IDs that you’ve seen in your logs. Here is an example:

4f67bfc603106cb2

These 16 characters represent 128 bits. 65k IDs would require 1 megabyte of space. We receive over 3 billion events per day and each event has an ID. Those IDs require 384,000,000,000 bytes or 45 gigabytes of storage. And that is just the space the ID field requires! To get the cardinality of IDs in our daily events we could take a simplistic approach. The most straightforward idea is to use an in memory hash set that contains the unique list of IDs seen in the input files. Even if we assume only 1 in 3 records is unique the hash set would still take 119 gigs of RAM not including the overhead Java requires to store objects in memory. You would need a machine with several hundred gigs of memory to count distinct elements this way and that is only to count a single day’s unique IDs. We certainly don’t have a single machine with several hundred gigs of free memory sitting around so we need a better solution.

One common approach to this problem is the use of bitmaps. Bitmaps can be used to quickly and accurately get the cardinality of a given input. While bitmaps drastically reduce the space requirements from the naive set implementation described above they are still problematic when the cardinality is very high and/or you have a very large number of different sets to count.  If we want to count to one hundred million using a bitmap you will need one hundred million bits or roughly 12 megabytes for each counter.  Sparse bitmaps can be compressed in order to gain space efficiency but our bitmaps are not sparse. It is also not uncommon for our jobs to contain hundreds or even thousands of counters so we require a more space efficient solution.

Luckily for us cardinality estimation is a popular area of research. We’ve leveraged this research and implemented, and open sourced, several distributed probabilistic cardinality estimation algorithms. We will not go into the details of how these algorithms work in this post but if you are interested you can find references to the relevant research papers in our GitHub project.  In general these algorithms provide a space efficient mechanism for estimating the cardinality of a set but with less than perfect accuracy. They do this by representing the count as a set of bit fields and use some hashing function to determine the relevant bucket and bit for the element being added to the set. One algorithm, the LogLog cardinality estimation, is amazingly space efficient. Using LogLog you can count up to 100 million distinct elements with 4% error using just 640 bytes.

So now that we can count the number of distinct elements in huge sets using probabilistic cardinality estimators we have to solve for another problem. Clearspring has close to 2 petabytes of storage spread across several hundred servers. We store partitions of our data on each server so in order to get the cardinality of the full data set we need to combine the results from each of the servers. Let’s look at an example.  Imagine that we have 3 servers and the table below represents the cardinality for the data on each of those servers:

We cannot simply add up the cardinality from each server and say that our total cardinality is 5000. That would assume that the data is partitioned in such a way that guarantees that no ID appears on more than one machine. If that condition is not true, as is often the case, we would be over estimating the cardinality by summing the results. This is where the true power of cardinality estimators really shines through. In addition to being space efficient, the cardinality estimators we use are also mergeable. This means that we can take the cardinality estimate, which is represented as an array of bits, from multiple machines and merge them together to get a cardinality estimate for the global set.

If estimating the cardinality of large sets is a problem you have then we recommend using probabilistic counters and if you happen to use Java then our stream-lib project is great place to start.

Want to work on problems like these?  We are hiring.

We’ve updated the AddThis menu with some great new sharing services. Those services include:

• Chime.in: a great service that allows you to connect around your interests
• Beat100: a video sharing site
• BufferApp: this service helps you to schedule sharing on your social media channels
• Surfingbird.ru: a site from Russia that gathers the best content from around the social web

You’ll also notice a something in our menu that prompts you to Write Your Rep. This is an amazing service from RaiseYourVoice.us. RaiseYourVoice is a service that helps citizens easily contact elected representatives and connect with organizations supporting their aims.

If you are on a site that uses the AddThis sharing widget, click the Write Your Rep service and you will be prompted to enter your zip code. The tool will then find your local reps and candidates and let you send them a message!

RaiseYourVoice is a service we are especially excited about offering, as we believe civic involvement is very important. It is an election year after all — let your voice be heard!

AddThis tracked what was hot at the Super Bowl and the Oscars, and now it’s time to spot what’s trending at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX.  We’ve got the up-to-date scoop of which startups are buzzing and more on our SxSW Spotlight, powered by data from the AddThis network of over 12 million domains.

Over the next twelve days we’ll be highlighting what people are sharing, searching for, and saying as they enjoy music, movies, and technology at this exciting event. Greg Cypes, our Director of Product, is on the ground in Austin as he has been for eight previous SxSW conferences.

Look for him and the rest of the Clearspring/AddThis crew attending the event – we’d love to see you. The best way to reach us is to tweet at our SxSW twitter account: @AddThisSxSW.

Also, If you like the SxSW Spotlight data and are interested in following more stats from our network, be sure to follow @AddThis, #ClearspringData or subscribe to this RSS Feed.

Lucky for you, AddThis supports the Pin It button, which has become a hot commodity for our users. And who can blame them with Mashable recently reporting the service as a top traffic driver, especially for women’s lifestyle sites.

We even took a dive into our own network’s data and things look as you would expect. Up and to the right:

So, don’t be the last one on the bandwagon. Get your AddThis implementation set up with a Pin It button, watch your photos get the inspirational love they deserve and turn that rock you’ve been living under into something like this!

What is Text Copy Tracking?

Text Copy Tracking is a new feature that measures the text users copy to their clipboards from your site. We do not track what users do with these copied keywords, but it is likely that many are put into a search engine. These keywords should give you a better idea of your audience’s specific interests and reveal opportunities to keep users engaged with your site. For privacy reasons, we omit any copies that appear to be a URL, an email address, or a phone number. You can use it on any page, but it will only be active for site visitors who are using a supported browser.

Do I need to upgrade my AddThis plugin to get text copy tracking?

No, we will be able to push this change automatically, all you have to do is sit back and start watching your analytics live view. If you want to turn off text copytracking you will have to update to the latest AddThis plugin for either Blogger or WordPress.

What happens if I want to turn off copy text tracking?

We understand some users may not want this feature, and we will still give users a way to disable text copy tracking. If you are a WordPress user make sure you have installed the latest version, 2.3.2 or greater, you can find the text copy track preference under the AddThis settings’ Advanced tab. On Blogger, if you installed our gadget you can check the box to opt out of text copy tracking via the settings page. For our Blogger widget you need to edit the code in the widget to include the addthis_config and set data_track_textcopy to false.

As always feedback is appreciated via comments below.