New Tools

We released new social plugins to help websites increase traffic and engagement. Here’s the official summary post.

• Welcome bar: The Welcome bar looks like a simple message bar to display at the top of your site, to welcome visitors based on who they are and where they come from. It is that, but its also an insanely cool API that we’ll be exposing more of as we go. Want to welcome visitors from Twitter with a specific prompt to follow you? Sure. But you can also do cool things like greet users arriving from mobile devices at a specific time of day, or specifically greet people coming from a blog that gave you some coverage. This is the kind of powerful personalization that increases your conversions, whatever your goals.
• Trending content box: The Trending content box promotes your content and increases recirculation within your site, leveraging the AddThis platform’s knowledge of what content can work best. It does simple things like most-shared pages, but also more sophisticated trending, and it’ll be getting more-so by the day. The UI is flexible so, unlike a lot of other tools, you can have it completely blend into your site and not try to take over your sidebar UX. Its also available as a direct feed, and the widget itself has a full API.

New Analytics

I won’t go too much into it here as its covered pretty well in the blog post, but all of the new tools are backed by the typically-great AddThis analytics. But we’re also now able to tell you about text that users are copying out of pages. Want to see the terms that are resonating with users, and might be good candidates for some intra-site links, or even be part of your SEO plans? We can do that. So on top of measuring ALL sharing on your site, we’re measuring all sorts of additional user engagement as well.  And yes, you can do this even without using AddThis for your site’s sharing.

New Website

The most obvious piece of the release is probably that addthis.com looks completely different. Its a wonderfully clean and sophisticated visual presentation, and I’m extremely proud of the design team for pulling this one together. We even have some real-time geo data on the home page, no fakery.  Some of the team that worked on this aspect of things will probably be talking a lot more about it on their blogs — check in with Jim, Foo, and Jeff.

New Numbers

How big is AddThis, and how many customers do we actually have? We’ve put out some new public numbers:

• AddThis code is seen by 1.3B unique users each month
• 14M domains use AddThis plugins
• AddThis code is loaded 90B views each month

We were big data before it was cool.

New Positioning

We’ve been known for a long time as a sharing tool. We’re the biggest and the best, so great. But we’re a lot more than that, and this is the first time we’ve been really out there talking about the extent of our platform and its capabilities, under one unified AddThis name. Surf the site, see all the different things we can bring to the table.  Pretty proud of the portfolio: big data + social infrastructure.

So we’ve got a lot going on here today. And this on the heels of another announcement I’m proud of. I’ll update with the press coverage.

Oh, and we’re hiring.

We’ve had this in the house for a while (the 2009 edition), but for some reason I’ve never really looked at it before. Incredible.

At Amazon and everywhere else.

I didn’t have any interest in maintaining and using separate systems for defects and detail work as well as for overall task management. So while there are a number of lightweight sprint planning tools out there, and a number of detailed issue-management systems, getting both integrated, with an experience we like, was not in the cards. So I built a relatively simple front-end for Trac data that gives a more whiteboard-style view.

Its not the most robust thing in the world (I built it as a quick internal tool), but hey, it works for us and if there’s interest in it, we’ll put some more energy into taking it forward for more general use. You can check it out on GitHub.

Scott Toepfer’s It’s Better in the Wind film project.

My mom didn’t make me brunch because she was at kickball…

yeah.