So starting today – no upgrade necessary – your visitors can share your content to Google+.  Our temporary workaround is to offer a landing page on addtoany.com that offers a Google +1 button that targets your original link.  A couple neat things about this: a) You don’t have to make any new changes since this is an automatic release, and b) Your pages do not incur the additional load of the Google+ JavaScript and button assets.

Of course, as soon as Google+ releases a traditional public sharing endpoint, we’ll switch over to it immediately and automatically.

Enjoy sharing to Google+!

Lockerz is best known as the leader in rewarding social expression and together we’re working on some awesome new things in the universal sharing space.

What’s changing?

Primarily just the front-facing name, dear developers.  The original mission continues.  AddToAny will be branded as Lockerz Share, and Lockerz Share will continue as the best universal sharing platform and widget.

Speed, efficiency, customization, and innovation will be at the heart of continued development, and we’re super excited about the upcoming months.  You should be too.  :)

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or thoughts:  http://www.addtoany.com/contact/

We love WordPress. We love feedback.

Today we are releasing version .9.9.8 of the plugin, and two little features are sure to please.

#1: WordPress widgets!

Not to be confused with the generic term, a WordPress widget is something that can be easily moved and manipulated in a theme without having to delve into code. So this new AddToAny plugin “widget” feature makes it very easy to move your sharing elements where you want them.

#2: Shortcode for sharing!

Ever wanted to display sharing buttons in the middle of a post?  Or wanted only certain posts to be shared? It’s pretty easy now.  To output AddToAny right where you want it, just type the following in a post:

[addtoany]

Want to customize the shared URL to share something other than the current post?  Try it like this:

[addtoany url="http://www.example.com/page.html" title="Some Example Page"]

Thank you to everyone in the WordPress community who has supported the plugin through recommending (sharing!), feedback, translations, and patches. It’s been a big help for over 4 years of active development. (We’re almost at version 1.0!)

Always and forever, please keep your feedback coming. You can download the sharing plugin here. Thanks!

As part of a series of new stuff we’re doing to celebrate 5 years, let’s start with something new and basic, a sort of FAQ and tour down memory lane from the founder of AddToAny himself:

Who started AddToAny?

AddToAny was founded by Yours Truly, Pat Diven II. I was in college in San Diego at the time of inception, working on several side projects alongside school and a couple of part-time jobs.

Why start AddToAny?

AddToAny solved what some geeks have coined the “ NASCAR ” problem. Circa 2005 websites and blogs were ugly (broad statement!). Users were visually assaulted with an agglomeration of “Add to” buttons. It looked a lot like sponsor logos on a race car: Add to Yahoo! Add to Windows Live! Digg it! Submit to Reddit! Bookmark with Delicious!  People who made websites were, how should I phrase it… very free-spirited when it came to placing third party “chicklet” images of varying sizes on their sites. Such chicklets included hot bookmarking & sharing services like Digg and Delicious, and fledging feed subscription services like Netvibes and Pageflakes. Multiplied by five. It looked crazy, and I wanted to calm the madness with something free and easy.

Enter “Add to Any”

“Add to Any” initially solved the problem by placing all of these “Add to…” chicklets onto a single “Add to Any” page. Publishers could then replace all of their chicklets with a single “Add to Any” button, thus curing the design bug immediately without affecting a growingly important feature.

The first public version of AddToAny didn’t have a logo image (that’s all CSS2, baby). The primary call-to-action was a long search-like input box to enter a URL to share/bookmark or subscribe to. The homepage had just two links. Speaking of the homepage, I originally offered AddToAny on a different domain back in 2005, but back then it was pretty exclusive to a small circle of friends.

To be fair, just as I insulted all webmasters in 2005 above, I’d like to point out that the initial “Add to Any” was equally (if not more) unappealing! Actually, it took a long while for the homepage to not appear so lackluster.

Where is AddToAny now?

In San Francisco. AddToAny has remained one of the most popular universal sharing platforms in the world. It kicks ass on the shoulders of open source software, particularly WordPress and Drupal. AddToAny is one of the most distributed widgets on the web, and the most distributed widget from a self-funded company. All organic growth. All without spending a dime on marketing.  Also, without really asking for help or ever announcing the localization feature, some amazing users have translated AddToAny in over 50 languages!

Why haven’t you raised a bunch of money?

Primarily to keep things simple and stable. For one, AddToAny started as a side project well before it became a startup company. Raising capital for something so simple and obvious without a clear path to revenue didn’t make sense at the time. Fundraising right now would be relatively easy, but we don’t need it. In many ways, I think the lack of outside funding has been advantageous.

Why haven’t you sold for a bunch of money?

There have been many, many serious and casual offers over the years, but why bother?  AddToAny is self-sustaining, lucrative even, and in a very happy place for both publishers and users. If AddToAny is ever sold, top priority will be to make damn sure that publishers and users are taken care of.

How do you make money?

Some publishers are clients, and we help optimize the advertising you may see on different websites across the web. It’s the data economy, and it works without mucking with anyone’s personal privacy. Ads are everywhere, they’re better when they’re relevant, and we’re happy to participate if it means legitimately better advertising while keeping AddToAny free.  We’ve experimented with different models, and I have to say:

It’s an awesome privilege not having to plead for your donations, or to offer a ‘full’ paid version and a ‘crippled’ free version. Perhaps the last thing I’d want is to do is sales for a product that has always been free and awesome but is suddenly awesome at a price. The last thing you’d want is my face plastered on your sharing button like Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia. [Share/Donate $ $ Pat's Face]

Thank you!

Without sobbing all over these pixels of reminiscence, I’d like to thank everyone who’s ever interacted with or supported AddToAny. To everyone who has sent a note in via our simple contact form, blogged about, posted a forum topic, submitted a patch, praised, bitched about, competed with, or [gasp] shared what started as my humble little project – THANK YOU.

What’s next?

We’ve innovated a lot in this space. AddToAny was the first all-inclusive sharing button, the first to offer a drop-down menu, the first to have a “find bar” for narrowing down services, the first with a “smart menu” to automatically prioritize services based on usage, the first to offer localization… you can expect a lot more of that.  Of course we strive to be the best sharing platform in the world, but there’s also loads more that can and will be done. As always, you can expect constant product improvement based on your feedback.  Adding to that, five years is widely perceived as a benchmark for celebration, so expect some celebratory surprises soon.

Bonus FAQ for Pat:

What were your side projects?

The first major one was iOS (mpios.com), a human-powered directory and search engine.  It was covered by USA Today and flailed after that. For a modern comparison, see: Mahalo‘s first public product and Apple’s, uh, revolutionary mobile and touchscreen operating system.

The second major one was stealth and I quickly flipped it.

The third major one was FeVote (fevote.com), which was a CRM product & platform that surfaced popular feedback for anything (think companies, products, events). This one was cool, had some traction, and more notably it’s the side project turned startup that I abandoned to go work on AddToAny. I am glad I did that…

The fourth one is your guess. Five years it’s been. And I’m quite happy that the cosmos aligned and I had the opportunity to take this thing seriously.

Thanks again, everyone, for your support and kind words over the last 5 years and onward!

(Feel free to share this post with the following little button I made five years ago:)

To start using goo.gl short URLs for your AddToAny button or standalone services, please see the AddToAny documentation on URL shorteners & “click-back” tracking. If you’re coding manually, just remember to drop the ‘e’ – the value should be ‘googl’ instead of ‘google’. Even we screwed that up once, twice, maybe a few times during testing.

This new feature comes in thanks to a Twitter message from Neasan. Thanks for the request, Neasan!

The slowness and downtime checks we have in place were immediately triggered on the first downtime event, then we spent the weekend ensuring a successful migration of AddToAny assets over to a new CDN, which was a three-party collaborative effort between AddToAny and the CDNs. We were able to switch CDNs within hours, but it took longer than expected to get some services back online. For HTTPS, which some publishers use, we waited far too long for our CDNs to reprovision our SSL certificate, but HTTPS was fully functional by Sunday night PST.

Nothing like this has happened since AddToAny first went online in March 2006. Very rarely if ever does a Content Delivery Network disappear overnight without notice. Such an occurrence is truly unprecedented and we’d like to offer ways to mitigate the fallout effects of this sort of doomsday event. We don’t expect something like this to happen again in the future, but we want to promote preventative measures and let publishers know that we’ll be taking some more industry-firsts ourselves.

One key advanced feature we’ve offered for some time is asynchronous script loading. To explain the power of this feature, publishers that were using AddToAny’s script asynchronously were unaffected by our script’s downtime over the weekend. Publishers using our popular Drupal sharing module were also unaffected thanks to asynchronous loading. If you’re comfortable with code, we definitely recommend implementing AddToAny in an asynchronous way.

Again, we are very sorry for any slowness this caused your sites. Please contact us if you have any questions at all about the downtime, or for advice on taking relatively easy preventative measures. Thanks for the reports, your patience, and for your understanding during what was a very unfortunate weekend for all of us.

The OExchange spec defines a common way for sharing services to receive content, and allows third party sharing services like AddToAny to discover new sharing services.

To kick things off, we’ve already implemented OExchange-Discovery for AddToAny’s all-inclusive sharing application. Sharing services, please note, this was really easy to do thanks to the tools available. It took us less than 10 minutes! We’re excited because as more services adopt OExchange-Discovery, the process of including new services in the AddToAny platform will be more efficient.

Cheers to the team at Clearspring for their work on OExchange, and we hope to see it used across many more services on the open web.

Users can grab a Google Buzz bookmarklet and publishers looking for a standalone sharing link can use AddToAny’s Google Buzz button link.  No update is required for publishers using AddToAny’s WordPress sharing plugin or AddToAny’s sharing module for Drupal.  Like all other service updates, this update is completely automatic.

What’s new?

Essentially, the new API is just a new syntax for customizing AddToAny, though we have exposed a few new customizations and techniques that you’re welcome to try out.

What’s changed?

Aside from the optional new syntax, most of the changes are under the hood.  Instead of configuring AddToAny using global variables, which in theory could collide with other global variables, you can now configure AddToAny under one self-contained object, a2a_config.  Additionally, the single object method offers a slight speed gain in modern browsers, and occasionally a noticeable difference in older A-Grade browsers on JavaScript-heavy pages.  Speaking of which, AddToAny’s intensive support for all A-Grade browsers (and more) continues with our long held believe that sharing should be quick and easy for as many devices and user-agents as possible, both old and cutting edge.

Transitioning to the new API

While transitioning to the new API is optional at this point, there are some important aspects to note.

• All transitioned properties take the same name as their legacy global counterparts
• Future properties will not have a supported global equivalent
• Be careful with syntax and handling of the a2a_config object
• Definitely check out the thorough examples and documentation, and list of available properties

If you have any questions or run into any problems at all, feel free to get in touch with us directly.  Happy early Valentine’s Day!

See the new AddToAny sharing analytics guide!

Keeping a watchful eye on Google’s analytics offerings, a few months ago we were extra-happy to see Google Analytics officially announce event tracking for everyone.  The ubiquity of Google Analytics event tracking has allowed us to update AddToAny’s Google Analytics integration to track each share as an event and to appropriately bucket all events into actions & labels within a single category.  With this enhancement, AddToAny brings you more useful and intuitive sharing stats within the analytics dashboard you already use.

With AddToAny’s G.A. integration, you could traditionally access detailed reports on:

• Top shared content
  • Which pages are visitors sharing and saving the most?
  • How many shares or saves for each page?
• Top destinations (including e-mail and browser bookmarking)
  • Which services are visitors sharing or saving to?
  • How many shares or saves for each service?

With the new G.A. integration, the above reports are easier to access and you can additionally:

• Drill down by content
  • Which services are used the most for a certain page?
  • How many shares or saves per service for a certain page?
• Drill down by service
  • Which pages are the most shared or saved to a certain service?
  • How many shares or saves per page for a certain service?

For those wondering, the new method indeed replaces the old access method.  So instead of filtering reports by addtoany.com, you can access your social bookmarking stats in two clicks or less from your Google Analytics dashboard.

With no further ado, check out the updated AddToAny Google Analytics guide, and go check out your stats!