AddToAny Blog

Twitter removes share counts

October 14th, 2015

By November 20, 2015, Twitter plans to remove share counts from both their official Tweet button and share counters across the web.

The product team at Twitter gave us a heads up, and we will gracefully remove Twitter as a supported share counter in AddToAny by early November. While counts for Twitter are going away, Twitter sharing will continue to be prominently supported on the AddToAny platform.

Existing AddToAny share counters for Twitter will simply have the counter alongside the Twitter icon removed. The Twitter share icon will remain intact, just without the counter.

Twitter’s official Tweet button will also have the counter removed, and will “render in the same pixel dimensions as a Tweet button configured without a share count today.” A bit of good news: the Tweet button will have a modern new design next month.

New Tweet button design

Publishers, developers, and designers use AddToAny share counters because they’re stylish, performant, and accurate as the official counts come directly from each supported service. Twitter, being the second most popular link sharing destination, was a key service to support since Tweets can be a strong social signal for trending content on the web.

On behalf of publishers, we are disappointed to see Twitter discontinue share counts; however, we understand Twitter’s hard decision at this point, and encourage Twitter to reconsider supporting counts at their next opportunity.

If you’re a developer and have feedback or questions for Twitter, you can post your thoughts in Twitter’s developer forum for websites.

The best icons and larger buttons come to your share menus

January 27th, 2015

Last August we announced a modern new design for AddToAny share menus, and this year begins with an exciting update to that design.

Vector icons

AddToAny has been bullish on highly optimized scalable vector icons, and we have extended the vector treatment to all AddToAny services, including the universal share menu and the universal subscribe menu. (Note: The following are zoomed-in screenshots, so try your nearest AddToAny button to see the real vector menus.) The universal share menu with SVG iconsSixteen square pixels of raster blurriness: be gone! AddToAny SVG icons look great at any scale on any screen, and they are spectacularly crisp on high-PPI devices such as Retina and Retina HD displays. Zoom all the way in if you’d like. Almost magically, AddToAny vector icons are super-lightweight, even faster loading, and gracefully switch to raster equivalents for older browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6-8 and Android < 4.4).

The new icons compliment a new modern font face and an increased font size. AddToAny now uses the best-available and fastest-loading system font starting with Helvetica Neue Light. So with larger icons and larger fonts, that leads us to…

Larger tap areas

Poking around a mobile touch interface can be difficult at times, so we made tappable targets even larger for menu buttons. A larger tap area is a relief on mobile touchscreens, yet still appropriate for desktop pointing devices like mice, trackpads, and the rare pointing stick.

Simpler menus

Multiple share buttons presented an opportunity to actually reduce the number of default options to a helpful degree. Larger icons, larger fonts, and less options improve glanceability, and we fully expect that to result in increased sharing activity.

Universal modal share menu with SVG share icons

With AddToAny, you’re always welcome to customize the share menu for your needs. Let us know if you have feedback on this universal menu update.

Flipboard button update

November 6th, 2014

This week we updated Flipboard across the AddToAny platform. Flipboard updated their sharing endpoint, AddToAny detected it, and the new endpoint was instantly rolled out to all AddToAny users. In classic AddToAny form, you don’t have to update your AddToAny plugins or code, but perhaps you’ll want to make Flipboard sharing more prominent on your site.

What is Flipboard?

Flipboard

Flipboard is a platform for readers to discover, collect and share new content. Millions of people use the Flipboard app for a beautiful reading experience, and the latest generation of Flipboard offers stories from over 34,000 topics to follow.

AddToAny always looks to provide the best possible integrations for major & nascent platforms. As with Twitter sharing templates, the official Pin It interface, and WhatsApp sharing on mobile, we’re keeping an eye on Flipboard for new opportunities for publishers and developers.

Below you can try out sharing to Flipboard’s web app, and you can add Flipboard to your site as a standalone button.