About ShareThis
ShareThis lets you instantly access all of your profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing and updating. We think users should be in control of their online world.
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Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend Web 2.0 this year. I was however, able to get an incredible taste of what was going on at the conference through Lee Odden’s TopRankBlog. Lee’s video interviews, photos, and commentaries were informative, and highly entertaining to me. The comments were also a fun read. I wish I could have been there to hear the The Fake Steve Job’s keynote. If you were there, but missed it, check out the video on Lee’s blog. Geek Gestalt’s Daniel Terdiman wrote a excellent piece on the speech as well.
Open vs. closed, that certainly seemed to be the question on people’s tongues and minds at Web 2.0. Becky Clarke wrote on her blog about the on-going discussion and desire to continue to open up the web, from all sides of the equation. She also mentions that personal connections are what she seeks in her web experiences. The personal recommendation is one of the underlying principles of ShareThis. We know people trust information that comes from a personal or professional resource. And, of course, when someone uses ShareThis, the recipient is free to receive the information, inside or outside of a network. In fact, Josh Bernoff supplied data to support how much we trust our ‘friends’ on his April 28, 2008 post.
Finally, I read a fantastic post on overall blogging tips culled and/or inspired by the Web 2.0 conference. Heather Mosley from Perkett PR gives her top ten tips on blogging. We of course, would like to add the 11th tip on how to simplify the sharing experience for readers. We hope to have Heather here as a guest blogger in a few weeks. Heather and colleagues at Perkett write very insightful and interesting commentary on social media and PR the Web 2.0 way. Be sure to take a read soon.
Hope to see everyone in 2009.
Julie
First and foremost, from all of us on the ShareThis team, we apologize for any stress or aggravation caused by our network outage. As some of you may have experienced, we lost one of our servers, and due to unprecedented daily growth, our other servers took on overload beyond their capacity. Additionally, we thought the problem was localized to a handful of clients, but over the course of the day, as these back-up servers overloaded, we realized the problem had cascaded across the network. This cascade meant, we weren’t able to give advance notification to everyone. We apologize to any of you that we missed or connected with too late. Indeed, this was the perfect technical storm for all of us.
Additionally, we know these events meant slow or no load times, time out of your busy day, and general annoyance with ShareThis. We won’t make any excuses. Our next generation back-up plan was a day late. Literally, for tomorrow, we had plans in place to triple capacity and implement a CDN. Again, these mistakes don’t excuse us. We screwed up your day, and we couldn’t feel worse about it. We promise, as we grow and you grow with us that the proper back-up systems will already be in place; and should we ever experience any of these types of difficulties, we promise to reach out to each of you with advance notification.
Thank you for your support of ShareThis. We welcome comments, suggestions and rants.
Tim
Many thanks to all the participants and organizers of The BlogHer 2008 Business Conference . BlogHer is a community of over 1400 bloggers, whose writing covers everything from gardening to politics to sex; and everything in between. Julie and I met some of these terrific women at the conference - Heather from Wiggly Wigglers to Dayle Haddon to Lena to Laurie from Sk-rt.com. We also learned a tremendous amount about women and social media, with great insights coming from the BlogHer/Compass 360 Social Media Survey. The key sentiment from this survey is that sharing is all about TRUST. As the Day two lunch sponsor, our presentation couldn’t have agreed more with the sentiment of sharing and trust. And, as the only male presenter at the conference, I and ShareThis were received with great enthusiasm, and quite a few AH-HA’s, including one very outloud, ‘This Rocks’ from Lena West and another one via Connie Reece on Twitter. In the days to come, I think ShareThis be hearing and seeing a lot more from the women of BlogHer. I know this feedback will be a tremendous resource to all of the team.
Additional thanks to Hoku and Denise at BlogHer for helping us get The ShareThis special offer page up and running on BlogHer. I used this page during my presentation to show the ease and simplicity of ShareThis. Check it out.
Tim
Kudos to MySpace for releasing a new posting API.
You’ll notice we have pushed out a MySpace posting choice on our social web tab that uses the new API, giving you easy access to post anything to your MySpace page.
And as always, from the Send tab you can access any of your MySpace friends to share directly with them. Create a mashed-up address book with your AIM Buddy List, Facebook and MySpace friends, as well as Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and more.
For more details about the latest launch, check out http://sharethis.com/news/20080221
Tim
We’ve received many requests to provide support for more blog platforms, so today we’re pleased to let our blogging friends know that ShareThis now supports Blogger and TypePad for quick and easy integration of the popular ShareThis button.
Simply go to sharethis.com/getbutton, select your blog platform and configure your ShareThis widget. You’ll also want to take advantage of the reporting capabilities that are available for all publishers. Within a couple minutes you will be the proud owner of a ShareThis widget that works for your site… it’s that easy and it’s FREE.
Try out the plugin thousands of other bloggers have been talking about. Leverage a variety of social media services with one button.
Benefits to your site include:
• Increase sharing activity and site traffic
• Reduce clutter on your site and offer more choices
• Gain better insight into your visitors are sharing your content
Drop us a line if you have any questions or comments at feedback@sharethis.com or on our ShareThis Forums. We love to hear from you.
Share The Passion
Tim
The Button is lookin’ good on your site and now you’re ready to take a good look at the numbers. Check out these reports to find out how much sharing is going on and where it’s going. Go ahead and explore with these simple, interactive charts for any date range you wish. You can even export the data to a spreadsheet if your heart desires.
To access your reporting simply log in to ShareThis and go to your Account page and selecting Reporting.
Special thanks to the beta testers who helped us work out some of the tougher issues with managing proxies and the ability to view multiple domains in your Reporting Dashboard. We think you’ll really like these features.
We know you’ll be anxious to check out your data so please dig in and enjoy! Ice Cream not included.
Share The Love
Tim
The New Year is starting off with a burst of great activity from bloggers, so we want to make sure everyone knows that the latest version of the WordPress Plugin has been tested and is now released.
The new ShareThis WordPress plugin version solves many issues of the previous versions. This new version contains strict valid XHTML whereas the older versions would cause validation issues. It also fixes the issue with the 2.1b1 version where in some cases the new customizing options would revert back to their default settings unexpectedly, as well the some theme and plugin collision issues that utilized prototype.js
ShareThis 2.1 also contains some additional features, including the ability to automatically add ShareThis to your posts and pages, and even the ability to turn this off so users can place the ShareThis button link wherever they wish using a template tag. Also, WordPress users will be able to take full advantage of our new global API options to further customize their ShareThis plugin. For more information on those check out our publisher support section.
As always…Keep Sharing!
OK, I’ll admit that I couldn’t help myself when I was a kid either. I had to peek at the gifts. So it should be no surprise to you that I couldn’t wait to share the updates that we have been cooking up in the workshop. Take a peek at what’s coming your way soon.
First, we are ready to begin beta testing of the ShareThis publisher reports. We have been logging data for you since you registered and installed ShareThis. If you want to participate in the test, please send a message to beta@sharethis.com. General availability of the reporting system will be in January.
Next, we have a new Blogger widget which we’ll make available as a private beta in the next week followed by general availability in January. Thanks to all who have been alpha testing our Blogger solution.
Finally, ShareThis WordPress 2.1 is available and it provides:
• New controls over font styling and positioning
• New feature that will disable auto-output of the button and allow for manual output whenever the user wants
Stay tuned and keep checking under the tree for updates. We don’t want you to miss out!
Tim
Just in time for the holidays, today we launched a revision to the ShareThis widget based on your feedback! The new version has some new features, bug fixes and improved performance. So grab a cup of eggnog and relax knowing that we’ve got you covered.
ShareThis version 2.x users automatically receive the updates. If you are using version 1.5.1 or less, you can get the latest version 2.1 at http://sharethis.com/getbutton
Here are the new features added to the ShareThis API (STAPI) in this update:
• Create your own custom buttons
• Optionally launch the ShareThis widget in a popup window instead of embedding it in your page
• Tie your own functions to the ShareThis button to customize the experience
• Choose whether or not to hide your embedded objects - now those objects can be visible on the page when the widget is active
You can view the complete detailed list of the new features at:
http://sharethis.com/publisher?type=stapi#javascript
The ShareThis widget loader has been upgraded with these bug fixes and optimizations:
• Faster widget loading to provide faster response when a button is clicked
• ShareThis button is now an inline element to allow easier placement and styling control
• Widget displays correctly inside elements when overflow:hidden and position:relative enabled
Thanks for using ShareThis and keep the feedback coming!
Time to share… The first feedback from our launch last week has been very good and we appreciated all who took the time to send us a congrats note. The rest of the feedback was primarily about:
- should I use version 2.0?
- Blogger and other blogs support
- general bugs and irregularities
So let me take these in order, clarify a few things, and let you know where we are headed.
Version 2.0 is different from the 1.x versions of ShareThis in that its a javascript based approach which provides some new benefits such as tracking, the configuring tool, sending features (where users can now save preferences and addresses) and the ability to make new features automatically available.
We believe most will find these benefits to be a great improvement and the speed of version 2.0 to be acceptable (we will be diligent to keep the performance quick). However, we completely knew and understood that many of you will prefer the classic WordPress plugin. In fact, we have launched version 1.5 in the 1.x code tree which has some new features.
We’ve also been hearing requests to provide more styling control to publishers and developers in version 2.0 similar to the classic version and we are going to do this in the coming weeks. We’ll announce theses updates on our web site when available.
ShareThis is not working correctly on Blogger for those who want to automatically place ShareThis on all Blogger posts. We’re already testing a quick fix in the works where we’ll explain steps to edit HTML in your Blogger template to make ShareThis work. If you want to test this, send me a quick note at alpha@sharethis.com. We are also working on a much easier Blogger solution similar to our WordPress plugin, which will take a little more time to launch… we’ll keep you posted. We have also received and duplicated your reports about problems using ShareThis on Typepad and some other blog types. We’re on it and will try to fix or provide solutions for these other blogs as soon as we can.
Finally, thanks to all who have provided bug reports and feedback. I hope you can tell from this message that we are listening and responding. We’ve already made changes to optimize version 2.0 based on feedback which was pushed to production (again, one of the benefits of the javascript solution). We also found a bug in version 1.5 so will push a fix later today.
More soon and keep sharing!
Mike Blackwell
