It was a long 5 days filled with minimal sleep and many events (both inside and out of the confines of Austin Convention Center). SXSW ’10 was a great experience for the members of our team who attended. We attended a lot of great panels and made countless valuable connections.
There were lots of great takeaways from SXSW, such as:
Location-based services will start to integrate into everything we do on and offline (I must have checked FourSquare 20 times a day to find the rest of our team)
We would also like to thank everyone who attended our panel The Future of Influence, and a bigger thanks to all those who voted for it as their favorite of the day.
For all those who soldiered through to the end of Interactive and attended #thePARTY, thank you! We loved being able to host such a great event and Vanessa and JT, you guys pulled it off without a hitch. Oh, and Vanessa, we need a few more people added to the guest list .
We’d also like to give a shout out to the Social Media Club for hosting us in their clubhouse on the Lake. It was a blast and we wish we had brought our swimsuits!
We’re excited to announce a new community using ShareThis — LiveJournal! Unlike a lot of other blog platforms, LiveJournal has long been a more connected community of interwoven personal journals on the web, and they have a big international community. With 26 million journals and 176,000 posts in the last 24 hours, it’s a fun place to discover (and share) new content. ShareThis will be replacing all Tell-A-Friend links on all journals. Both text links and a sharing icon can be found globally. Read more about it.
I just went from a blog about the demise of band Velvet Revolver to one about Radiohead – even the Russian president is rumored to have a blog here. We’re excited to start seeing what LiveJournal readers like to share – and where they like to share it. If anyone has a LiveJournal, let us know what you think.
It’s that time of year again. The weather in Mountain View is just starting to warm up(not that it ever got colder than 50 degrees), and we in Silicon Valley are celebrating by leaving town. That’s right, it’s time for South by Southwest in Austin, Texas! We are really excited about this year because we will be participating in a panel AND co-sponsoring a party with theMIX agency and other hot startups such as Plancast and Tap11.
We also have a special treat for you SXSW attendees this year (as well as those of you who can’t make it, but still want to stay in the loop). As many of you know, we recently released the ShareThis Stream to see what’s trending right now on the web as well as what your friends are sharing. Well, if you go to http://sharethis.com/SXSW you will find a special version of the stream, just showing what’s trending about SXSW. That way, you’ll always know what the hottest events are.
Today is one of those exciting days that you don’t get to experience very often – the culmination of months worth of work, coming to a head. Everyone here at ShareThis has been anticipating this release for weeks, putting in extra hours in order to get ready for this moment: the launch of our newest product, the ShareThis Stream.
We’re extremely proud of our work on the ShareThis Stream and think it’s going to be a valuable product for our users. At its simplest, the ShareThis Stream is a great tool for cutting through the noise of the Web using the most valuable filter you have – your friends. At its deepest, the ShareThis Stream represents a wider switch that’s happening right now, as sharing becomes more than just a simple utility and moves toward being a central social action for Web users.
The ShareThis Stream is a real-time view of sharing across the Web, combining the content your friends are sharing with what people are saying about it. Users sign in through Facebook Connect and Twitter, and then can instantly see what their friends have been sharing, the comments surrounding it and Tweets related to the content. You can also dig in a bit and search for content via subject or see what else people are sharing on a specific site. For a more in-depth explanation of the ShareThis Stream, please read this post from Nick Bertrand, our director of product.
We’ve also built in a little something extra for our publishers, who can sign up to get the Stream on their site through our API or widgets. Also, when a user shares something from one of our publishers’ sites, they’ll automatically be shown a list of related shares from that site. All of these new features are designed to drive traffic and engagement on our publishers’ sites.
Like I said before, the ShareThis Stream takes sharing beyond being a simple utility – it allows people using sharing to help them navigate and curate the Web. Conversations usually start around topics – Tiger Woods, Haiti, the Olympics– and the ShareThis Stream helps you easily find those conversations as they happen.
So, come on in, sign in and play around a little bit. And keep sharing.
We are very happy to launch several new features today:
1) Ability to sign in with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo!
2) New sharing buttons that include a counter so you can see how many time a web page was shared.
3) Improved sharing widget that suggests related content based on what you share.
4) Last but not the least: a truly innovative ShareThis Stream where you can see what is currently trending and shared on the web.
We apologize in advance for your addiction
I want to apologize in advance for the fact that you may get seriously addicted to our stream, as we all became addicted to it while building and testing it. For example, this morning Jenny, one of our engineers, told me “my husband didn’t want to go to sleep last night because he tried the Stream and said he just re-discovered the internet!” Here’s what you may find yourself doing with the Stream:
Checking the “Trending” stream for a view of what your friends are saying about what’s hot on the web.
Watching the “Real-Time” Stream for a view of what everyone is sharing across 130,000 sites, instantly, in real-time. Warning: you’ll see some jewels and some of the weirdest content ever, but that’s what makes it entertaining.
Frantically checking MyShares, where your favorite shared web pages are automatically saved when you’re signed in.
What is unique and innovative about the ShareThis Stream is the fact that we use sharing data from ALL sources and channels, which include Facebook, Twitter, Google, MySpace, a ton of others, and also email. This means that we have the ability to find the hottest topics at any given moment based on what people are REALLY sharing, because our stats include all possible sharing channels. Our stream will also be one of the first to bring together, in one place, both what your friends are sharing and what the entire web population is sharing.
Here is a short video presentation:
What’s next
Since the Stream is currently in early Beta, there are kinks for sure, but it’s more fun that way and you will see regular improvements based on your feedback. There will also be a bunch of new features soon, here is what you can expect in the next few weeks:
Integration with all major social services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, LinkedIn, or Microsoft Live. This means that the Stream will include the best content from your friends whether they are on the web — all in one place.
Ability to add your favorite topics or website to the Stream.
A smarter stream that will adapt to your preferences in order to show you only what you like.
Stats on what happens after you share a web page, such as how many people liked it, number of retweets, number of comments, etc.
Cool new secret features I can’t tell you about right now
The ShareThis team has been working very hard on these new features in the past months, we hope you love them, and we can’t wait to know what you think about them.
So please give us your feedback, either by filling a survey here or by writing to us at: feedback@sharethis.com.
We’ve seen a number of interesting tidbits on how people are sharing across all the big social channels. We know that sharing is the core of the social web and that sharing is engaging and valuable.
Here’s how sharing behavior has changed on the ShareThis network (130,000 sites) over the last year:
- Email is still a critical part of sharing on the web today, making up 38% of all sharing.
- Facebook has exploded, growing from ~30% to 39% of all sharing on the web.
- Other social channels, such as Digg, Reddit, and others, have dropped from ~20% a year ago to 13% today.
- Twitter was barely registering on our reports a year ago and is now around 8.7% of all our shares.
It’s always exciting to see a big company like Google launch a new product, such as today’s blast-off of Google Buzz. While it’s always nice to have another toy in the social sandbox to play with, today’s announcement sent the ShareThis offices atwitter for a different reason – it had the word “share” all over it. We’ve been like a broken record on this – sharing is the center of the social Web. It’s the crucial act in people’s online interactions, the way that conversations starts and where 90 percent of the value for businesses is. Today’s announcement was validation of all that we’ve been saying.
Look at the dominant medianarrative’s coming outof today’s announcement: War! Google vs. Facebook vs. Twitter! And at the center of that war? Sharing. It truly is the connective tissue of the Web. We’re delighted that the big guys have finally figured this out.
Every day many new sites sign up with ShareThis. We are grateful to help their users share and it was a big honor to be the sharing choice for the 52nd Grammy Awards’ official site, especially in a year when social media was such a big part of its success in boosting its audience to a six year high.
At its peak, the Grammy’s website was among the top 5 publishers throughout the ShareThis network and stayed in the top 10 for a while after the event. It’s great to see an event with such long-standing traditions embrace social media so successfully.
On another note, we would like to welcome a few new publishers to the ShareThis network: Break, Travelocity, and Share Some Sugar.
We’ve talked before about how sharing is the heart of the social Web, a concept that I immediately thought of when watching a recent webinar from Altimeter Group entitled “Understanding Your Customers’ Social Behavior.” The webinar – presented by analysts Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang – introduces a concept called “socialgraphics” to help companies understand the social behavior of their customers in order to better understand and engage with them through social channels. The analysts broke social Web use down in to five levels of activity (in ascending order): watching, sharing, commenting, producing and curating.
Each level is a more engaged Web user, with producing and curating comprising just 10 percent of all people online, while the other 90 percent fall in to watching, sharing and commenting. This is a great illustration of how important sharing on the Web is, and why brands should understand how and why people share things – it is a base activity for Web users. As is referenced in the presentation, ShareThis reported that sharing through our button increased 200 percent in 2009, and another study referenced in the webinar found that 60 percent of American Web users engaged in some type of sharing.
So what’s next? In 2010, new ways for filtering and measuring the social web will emerge and marketers will realize that technologies and targeting techniques won’t measure up unless they can deliver mass adoption and an aggregated, measurable view of social media value.
Here is the eBook, or you can download a PDF copy. Lots of good tips, tricks and discussion starters in there.
Steve
Tim
Heidi
It was a long 5 days filled with minimal sleep and many events (both inside and out of the confines of Austin Convention Center). SXSW ’10 was a great experience for the members of our team who attended. We attended a lot of great panels and made countless valuable connections.
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It’s always exciting to see a big company like Google launch a new product, such as 
