In September 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, making us the leading distributed sharing platform.  Our vision for the combined entity was simple – provide the web with a simple platform to make it simple to share any content, to anyone, anytime.

The growth that we have experienced since then has been stunning.  When we joined forces, we reached around 200MM unique users.  With your help we have more than doubled that reach.  As of April 2009, comScore Extended Web reports that we now reach over half a billion people – nearly 50% of the entire global web.

As we have rushed to keep pace with our growth, we’ve laid the groundwork to enable the realization of our vision for a truly open content sharing platform.   We started by leveraging the knowledge, functionality, and infrastructure to improve AddThis.   We’ve revamped the Web site, rewrote the AddThis JavaScript client, created in depth documentation and support mechanisms, and applied our world-class analytics infrastructure to improve the AddThis reporting experience.   To date, these changes have been made to improve AddThis as a platform for sharing links.   Today, we are taking the first step towards making AddThis the one-stop-shop for developers wanting to enable sharing beyond links.

Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website.   Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them.   We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.

No cake is complete without the icing.  So responding to popular demand, we added a set of blogging services as sharing destinations that you may remember from Clearspring - Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress.com and Tumblr.  We also added our friends from Plaxo.

As you can see, this is a jam packed update.  We are taking our platform in what we think is a big and exciting direction.   So please keep up the great feedback.  Feel free to let us know what works for you, but also what doesn’t work.   Drop a comment on the blog post, start a thread in our forum, or e-mail me directly - justin@addthis.com.

So… what do our CEO Hooman Radfar, our Board of Directors, and President Obama all have in common? Well, they’re all featured in the May issue of the Washingtonian.

Hooman and each member of Clearspring’s Board of Directors were featured as 100 of the top “Tech Titans” in Washington, DC. Oh, and I, your humble community manager, made the list as well.

I was hoping that we could point you to the link but right now the story is only available in the print edition. We’ve taken these photos as an adequate substitute:

President Obama, in the now infamous cover with a photo of him shirtless, was featured as one of the 26 reasons why people love living in DC.

Well, we did it up this year.

Below is photographic evidence of the shenanigans from our various offices. We haven’t gotten the photos from the West Coast office yet. I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

Team NYC

Team Virginia

The Leader

Our Favorite Pregnant One

Account Management Queen

Princess Bunny

Sales Princess

Affiliate Guy

Media Director

Tomorrow, I’ll post some other Clearspring team members.  (Bonus points to whomever can name all people listed above.)

Just sign into Clearspring and pick the widget you want to edit. Go to the Publish tab and click on “Widget Home Page Settings.” Select the Enabled/Disabled radio buttons for Comments and/or Ratings.

What do you think of the widget home page? Is there a way we can make it better? E-mail me - justin@clearspring.com.

In today’s release, we put up a feature that a lot  of you have been asking for. You can now manage which sharing services come up as “popular” in the Launchpad menu for your widget.

By default the services listed are a combination of what services a user has used before and the most popularly used services. Changing what’s popular overrides this behavior.

To change them, sign into Clearspring and find the widget that you want to change. Click “Customize Menu” and then go to “Services.” There you’ll be presented with a button that says “Choose Popular Services.” Click on it and you can easily choose which services should show up as popular in the Launchpad menu.

Definitely let us know what you think of this. Comment on this post or e-mail me personally - justin@clearspring.com.

For the menu’s sub-pages, the header color is now driven off of what you specified for colors in the menu customization portion of the console. The color is no longer hard coded on our end. (See screenshot above.)

We’re doing the same thing for user input error messages. The color of that text is based off the colors you set for the menu in the console. (See screenshot above.)

Finally, upon successfully sharing a widget, the user is now presented with a close button that if clicked will completely close the Launchpad sharing menu and take you back to the widget, if you’re using Launchpad In-Widget. (See screenshot above). If you’re using Launchpad On-Page, it’ll take you back to the main sharing menu.

Let us know what you think of these updates or if there is anything else we can change for the better. Drop me an e-mail - justin@clearspring.com.

As I look back over the last twelve months, I’m just truly blown away by all that were able to do and accomplish. I give total credit to the incredible team that I get to work with on a daily basis and to our CEO Hooman Radfar for creating and sustaining a culture where the team is dedicated to making an impact on the world we live in.

Here are some highlights from the past 12 months:

I got to meet and get to know many of you during my travels around the country. There were cities like Miami, Austin, New York City, Rochester, San Francisco, and Seattle.

We had some pretty exciting product announcements, like the Launchpad In-Widget APIs, integration with the MySpace Apps Gallery, Bebo Application Promotion, WordPress.com integration, launching a brand new version of our sharing menu, address book integration, and testing widget recommendations.

Some pretty cool widgets launched including those about and for U2 3D, the Oscars, ESRB’s Video Game Rating Search, The Spirit, The Daily Telegraph, RCRD LBL, SnagFilms, Blogs.com, SNL, ABC, John McCain & Barack Obama, the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted, Governor Schwarzenegger, and many more.

As a company, we achieved some pretty big milestones, like the launch of the redesign of our web site, receiving ABCi accreditation for analytics, winning “Hottest Buzz”, the acquisition of AddThis, a partnership with MTV, passing 300 million unique visitors per month, and winning Blogger’s Choice in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

I’m really excited to see what happens over the next 12 months. I’m confident that together we’re going to be able to do some pretty amazing things.

Developing our widget distribution platform Launchpad really has been a conversation between us and you. You all tell us what your priorities are and then we try and work those into the product roadmap.

One thing that you’ve told us over and over again is that you want Launchpad to be as customizable as possible. Well, we’ve just done a visual update for the Launchpad menu to help with this.

In its previous state, we had a high level of customizability but after a point it started to degrade the user experience. So… we maintained the same level of flexibility but decided to simplify things slightly. The destinations are now displayed in more of a list. We’ve changed the font. Now everything’s done in panes that overlay each other.

We’ve also moved away from the tabs. For example, the tabs for “Popular” and “All” destinations have been removed. The choice of all destinations is now just another option in in the destination list. (See the screenshot above)

In this release, you may also notice that we updated and sped up the Address Book integration. It should pull down e-mail addresses faster. We’ve also added support for more languages.

Let us know what you think about this release. Drop me a comment on this post or drop me an e-mail: justin@clearspring.com

Thanks!

Thanks to the feedback we continue to get from you guys about how we can make Launchpad better, we’re able to continue to make changes to improve the platform.

Well, Facebook has recently updated their application creation process. In this release, we updated our Facebook Application Wizard to match this new process and hopefully make it even easier for you to convert your Clearspring widget into a Facebook app.

Can you do me a favor? Can you take 5 minutes, convert a widget to a Facebook app, and then drop me an e-mail? You can reach me at justin@clearspring.com.