galileo maeshary

Showing posts with label addthis. Show all posts

Fun with Birthdays at AddThis

Today is our CTO's birthday, and the team had some fun decorating his cube. Here's a time lapse of the process:

And the final result:

Why I Use AddThis

Here's a nice article by David Pierce talking about AddThis personalization and why he uses the AddThis sharing platform on his site. Couldn't have explained it better myself- thanks David!

Why I Use AddThis | Digitizd Plus

Follow: A New AddThis Labs Experiment

This morning we released a new feature in AddThis Labs called AddThis Follow. You've probably noticed "Follow us on Facebook..." and similar links on various websites you've visited. We thought we'd offer our AddThis publishers an easy way to not only quickly add this feature to their site, but also track clickthroughs to their social profiles right in their AddThis analytics console.

I've added my own Follow menu to this blog, over on the right side of the page.

This new feature supports social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, YouTube and Flickr. Once visitors start using it, I'll be able to go to my AddThis.com analytics, switch from "Sharing" to "Subscribe/Follow" data and track how my visitors are connecting to my various social media profiles.

We'd love to hear what you think of this experiment; would you use it? Are there things you would add or change? Give us your feedback in the AddThis Follow forum.

Get a Follow menu for your own site here:

AddThis Follow Labs Experiment

Justin Thorp's official blog post

New AddThis Gallery Examples

Today we released some new examples of fun menus created using AddThis APIs. The menu above animates as the user rolls over the different sharing icons, and locks itself to the bottom of the page.

Check it out: Code | Demo

Here's another example that places itself in the bottom right corner of the page, in a fixed position, and launches a stack of sharing icons:

You can find out more about this implementation here: Code | Demo

We also released a version of a sharing menu that maintains a fixed position in the top left corner of the screen.

These examples and others in the AddThis Gallery were developed to help publishers understand just how completely customizable the AddThis sharing platform is – we hope you grab these, make them your own, or come up with other amazing ideas. We'd love to hear from you.

Ed: Big hat tips to Jeff and Foo for all the hard work on these!

Sharing, Your Way

Here's a list of fun social media icons that can be used to customize sharing services like AddThis for your site, check them out:

30 Amazingly Creative Social Bookmarks Icon Sets - Speckyboy Design Magazine

For help with customizing AddThis for your blog or site, check out Customizing AddThis and the the API overview. Have fun!

Big AddThis Design Release Today!

After a ton of hard work from our design and web development team, today we launched updated analytics and a new look and feel for AddThis. Our design objectives included streamlining the global navigation and revisiting our 960 grid to refresh all of our page templates.

We also significantly expanded our analytics offering for the 800,000 sites that use AddThis for sharing.

Huge hats off to Jeff Wong (creative direction), Foo (CSS/HTML) and Philip Sharp (dev lead), as well as our whole QA team.

Our awesome community manager Justin Thorp (Twitter/Blog) will be blogging more about the new features later today over on the (new!) AddThis Blog. For those interested in some of the process and specifics that went into this redesign, Jeff and I will be blogging about that topic over on the AddThis blog soon, stay tuned.

Here are some before and after screen grabs.

Home page, before:

After:

Expanded analytics, before:

After:

At Clearspring, we get to play in the world of sharing everyday. We wanted to try to capture some of that fun with a new design for the AddThis blog.

Before:

After:

And we're just getting started – stay tuned for more analytics and design enhancements coming soon. In the meantime, check out the new and improved AddThis.com. We'd love to hear what you think.

Is there more to social networking than Facebook and MySpace?

(Data as of Feb 24, 2010)

Looking at the list of top social networks on AddThis (overall sharing, last 30 days) it's quickly apparent that while Facebook and MySpace dominate, at least half of the other top 12 services are destinations that are popular outside the United States. Orkut, Viadeo, Sonico, meinVZ, studiVZ and Hyves are all social networks that are very popular in other countries, and the others have heavy international usage as well.

A Closer Look at Orkut

Orkut is a great example; Wikipedia notes that although it started with a heavy US user base in 2004, by 2010 Orkut's users heavily skewed towards Brazil (47%) and India (38%) because of, among other factors, the dominance of Portuguese as the primary language of its users.

These numbers are mirrored by the sharing stats for Orkut via AddThis, where it's usage is heavily dominated by users in Brazil, India and Portugal.

If you compare the United States to Brazil, in the latter country Facebook is only #5 and Orkut enjoys over three times as much sharing:

Top 10 Services

GlobalWebIndex.net offers another interesting insight: while 43% of US internet users manage a social network profile, almost 60% of users in Brazil do, and these numbers persist across several other measures of online social activity. That's a heavily engaged and active social audience.

United States

Brazil

(Screen grabs from GlobalWebIndex.net)

These kinds of data are what makes working in social media so much fun. There's a whole world of people sharing across hundreds of different destinations – much more varied and interesting than just a few popular social networks.

Find out more:

Taking the Pulse of Sharing: A Closer Look at the New AddThis Service Directory

One the most interesting aspects of my job at AddThis is having the opportunity to use data to drive design decisions. The AddThis sharing platform is immense, and as a designer I'm incredibly fortunate to have access to a huge amount of information to help us optimize user experience for both publishers and their visitors.

At the core of this experience are the hundreds of different services (currently 233) used to save and share pages, as well as lots of lots of other things like printing, translating, converting to PDFs, shopping, and more.

Now with today's launch of the next AddThis Service Directory, you can explore all different kinds of trends across services and countries to understand how the world is sharing. One of the things we discovered early on is that when you step back and look at the bigger picture, across over 50 languages and hundreds of locales, sharing is much more varied and interesting than just Facebook and Twitter. For instance, in Brazil, Facebook is only #5 – Orkut is #1 with 25% of sharing. In China, Google Bookmarks is #1.

I thought I'd take a look at one my personal favorites, Email App, a service you can use to share any link using your computer's native email application. It's currently our fastest trending service, up 56%:

This sharp increase in usage began when we added an easy way to discover this and other email services to our email form:

This change helped to boost usage of the other email services as well:

Using these kinds of tools, we can understand whether a particular design decision works, and compare different approaches to offer our users the most effective experience we can.

AddThis Service Directory

Share any page from Safari on your iPhone with AddThis

As you might have guessed, I love to share interesting things I come across using AddThis. If I'm using my laptop or desktop mac, I can use AddThis for Firefox (or IE or Chrome or even a bookmarklet.)

If I'm using my iPhone, it's not as easy. If that website uses AddThis, no problem, I can use the handy iphone-optimized sharing menu. But if that site doesn't use AddThis yet, I have to use Safari's email-link feature. Not optimal.

Here's a bit of a hack that makes AddThis sharing easy from any page in Safari for iPhone. These instructions will create a sharing "bookmarklet" for iPhone Safari – basically Javascript that looks and acts like a bookmark:

Navigate to this page on your iPhone, and copy the Javascript below.
Bookmark this page (or any page you like); save the bookmark wherever you'd like your bookmarklet to be.
Open the bookmark menu on your iPhone (it's on the bottom menu in Safari, the icon that looks like an open book), navigate to the bookmark you just created, and edit it.
Change the name of the bookmark to "Share", or whatever you'd like to call it.
Remove the saved URL completely, and paste the copied Javascript where the URL was and save the changes.

Here's the Javascript code:

javascript:void((function(svc)%20%7Bvar 
%20d=document,w=window,p=0,b=function()%7Bif(!p)%7Bp=1;if 
(w.addthis_sendto)addthis_sendto(svc%7C%7C'bkmore', 
%7Bproduct:'bkm-'+_atc.ver%7D)%7Delse%7Bp=0;if(_atw)_atw.clb()%7D%7D;if 
(!w._atc)%7Bvar%20ol=w.addthis_onload%7C%7C%5B%5D,o=d.createElement 
('script');o.src='//s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js? 
domready=1&username=bookmarklet';ol.push 
(b);w.addthis_onload=ol;d.getElementsByTagName('body') 
%5B0%5D.appendChild(o)%7Delse%20b()%7D)())

Now, when you want to share a page, just open the bookmarks menu in Safari on your iPhone, select your new Share bookmarklet, and instead of navigating to another page Safari will execute the Javascript and share the page using AddThis.

Big hat tip to my partner in crime Jeff Wong for this tip.

Trying out the new AddThis Sharebar

Just installed the new AddThis Sharebar that we launched this morning in AddThis Labs. We developed this feature at the request of some of our publishers, and as an example of our APIs and Sharing Endpoints.

Thoughts? Let us know what you think in our Forum.

Crowdsourcing Translation

AddThis is used all over the world, by over 500 million people. To make sharing easier, anywhere, we wanted to translate our sharing menu into as many languages as possible. We started out doing this using the AddThis Forum which worked well, but probably wouldn't scale. Instead, we thought a more structured tool would help not only enlist the help of our user base, but also help to communicate which languages are supported or in the queue.

To this end, we recently launched a Language Database to allow users to submit translation revisions and new languages. We're up to 50 supported languages as of our last release. One of these days we're going to wade into Latin and Pirate, but in the meantime, if you speak one of the languages we don't yet support, we'd love to hear from you.

Visit the AddThis Language Database

Beautiful AddThis Toolbox Implementation

Abduzeedo is a blog about design, and their recent implementation of the AddThis Toolbox to create a sharing menu is big, bold and beautiful, just as you'd expect. Check it out: scroll down the following page (and enjoy the case study as well!)

Introducing Inknition + a Nice Case Study | Abduzeedo | Graphic Design Inspiration and Photoshop Tutorials

You can get your own AddThis Toolbox code here, as well as a collection of custom sharing icons.

Shared via AddThis

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Very nice summary of strategies from Smashing Magazine. One of my favorite related strategies is: scale interfaces for users. It helps both first time users determine how much complexity they want and need to get their task done, as well as returning users who have increased in skill using your application.

This is a strategy we try to employ everyday at Addthis. Many publishers just want to grab AddThis code and go, so we built a simple process to do so right up front on the home page, no registration required. Huge enhancement to user experience for our visitors, and enormous uptake for overall usage of AddThis. Want more options? Sure, no problem! But publishers don't have to deal with complexity if they don't want to.

More from Smashing Magazine:

Minimizing Complexity In User Interfaces

Shared via AddThis

AddThis Halloween Logo

At AddThis, we like to have a little fun with our logo on major holidays. Our creative director Jeff Wong recently posted ideas for this year's Halloween logo:

There are some funny outtakes there as well, check them out at his blog:

Jeff Wong Design: http://jeffwongdesign.blogspot.com/2009/09/vote-for-addthis-halloween-logo-sneak.html

Custom AddThis Toolbox Menu: New Halo 3 Video

Nice custom implementation (video requires age check...)

Halo3: ODST

Shared via AddThis