Comparing “AddThis” to “ShareThis”
August 7, 2008
By: Brad Andersohn
Author's Website: http://www.activerain.com
There are a couple of really great tools you can use on your Blog posts. One is Addthis.com and the other is ShareThis.com. Both have some great features for the growing Social Bookmarking phenomena. I wanted to share them both and at the same time get your opinion as to which is better and why. Here’s a conversation I had with Zoltan from RealBird about ShareThis. I currently use Addthis, but am considering a change.
Share this Screen Shot:
Quote from Zoltan:
Brad - I saw that you are using AddThis on your blog. Many large blogs have addthis.com like Techcrunch and many large ones have ShareThis like Mashable, Problogger and others. They are direct competition to ShareThis. I was using them as well on some of my sites, but I switched to ShareThis for many reasons:
- My personal (!) preference - i like the design, the button (especially the rotating icon) and the overall implementation better.
- When I deployed them on the RealBird listing sites (10,000+) ShareThis was very eager to help and assist.
- Has a neat javascript API, which helped me with some of the non-trivial (AJAX) implementations, where the Url to share changes and I need Javascript to update the button’s parameters on -the-fly.
- ShareThis has a built in email sharing as well - which turned out to be the most used sharing mechanism for some of our deployments according to ShareThis statistics.
- The word “Share” implies more, than “Add this” for consumers. ShareThis also allows you to use the code with any custom links, buttons and HTML objects through their javascript API.
- ShareThis raised a lot of money, which implies to me that they are well-positioned to be around for a longer time and should be up for something big. How can they justify raising $21 million otherwise ?
So which is it going to be? I like the 6 points made from my friend Zoltan, and I am heavily leaning toward the ShareThis option. Do you use these tools? Are you sharing and Social Bookmarking? What’s your take on these two competitors and their products? I’m always looking for better ways to help readers and Bloggers get the most out of their online experiences.
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Blogging, Gadgets
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Comments
28 Comments so far
Jay Thompson on August 7, 2008 1:55 pm
I’ve tried both on my blog and to be honest, found they occasionally bogged down and affected page load performance.
I’ve since installed the Sociable plug-in and have been pleased so far. (http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/)
It should be noted that I used both AddThis and ShareThis some time ago and they may have resolved some of the issues I experienced. ShareThis did have some cool tracking/stats features. Between teh two you mention, I prefer ShareThis.
jeremy on August 7, 2008 2:20 pm
Havem’t tried either yet…I need to get my butt in gear with some of this stuff!
Brad Andersohn on August 7, 2008 2:38 pm
Jay - great feedback. I’ll check out Yoast for Wordpress as well. Thanks. BTW - It was Great to meet you in SF at Inman.
Brad Andersohn on August 7, 2008 3:39 pm
Jer - get your butt in gear! lol~
Brad Andersohn on August 7, 2008 3:42 pm
I just had this information sent to me from ShareThis:
“We’ve recently released some new features that we think you’ll find exciting. We’ve added both Sphinn and FriendFeed to the Social Web Tab. Special thanks to all of you who’ve submitted requests for these two great services.”
If you’d like to submit a social web service to be placed in their ShareThis widget, go to sharethis.com, and fill out their submission form.
David Mackey on August 7, 2008 7:38 pm
I’m working on deploying ShareThis on my site right now….Unfortunately there appears to be an issue if your title/content contains any single quotes. See http://forums.sharethis.com/topic/how-to-escape-single-quotes?replies=2
Brad Andersohn on August 7, 2008 9:47 pm
David - I found a couple issues myself with adding the ShareThis widget to my Blog and individual posts. Zoltan is looking into it for a resolution. Always good to hear the Good, Bad, and Ugly about these things, isn’t the internet a wonderful thing? Thanks for sharing that link and information.
Zoltan Szendro on August 8, 2008 11:14 am
It is true, that since ShareThis uses more complex Javascript for implementation, there can be some conflicts with the host environment such as the one mentioned by David above. Hopefully, these are easy fixes by ShareThis once they receive the bug report.
A few more things I like about ShareThis:
Color theming allows seamless integration into any UI design. In most cases it does not matter, but for some, this can be crucial however.
ShareThis.com also allows sharing not only through email but through IM and SMS ! I just tried the SMS sharing and I received the link and custom message within seconds on my phone. AddThis currently seem to promote social bookmarking only, while ShareThis took it beyond bookmarks and provide universal sharing (including bookmarks, email, IM, text messaging etc.)
As we talked about it with Brad, on RealBird, email sharing is still the most popular way for people to forward the information, especially when they want to share info with a selected group of people as opposed to promoting it to the general public. ShareThis saves a few clicks for consumers by providing a compact email utility within the widget.
Online sharing has 3 main categories:
1., Online bookmarks - saving information for future, personal use - not necessarily sharing with others
2., Social bookmarking - the intention is to share information with the general public
3., Sharing with friends - sharing with a group of people or individual. Email still seems to be the most popular method for this
ShareThis provides tools for all 3 categories, while AddThis focuses only on 1 and 2. This was one of the reasons we selected them for all of our property websites. In our case, most sharing activities falls into category 3 above.
– Zoltan
RealBird.com
David Mackey on August 8, 2008 12:29 pm
I was able to fix this issue in my instance since my system uses the Smarty/Template-Lite templating engine. It was a simple | escape to tell the templating system to replace special characters before passing off to ShareThis. Its not working great.
Zoltan Szendro on August 8, 2008 3:28 pm
Looks good David.
Brad Andersohn on August 8, 2008 4:56 pm
Zoltan - thanks for a wealth of information. Looking forward to diving into this further now. I like some of the features you mention and your comparisons. Great stuff my friend, thanks.
Brad Andersohn on August 8, 2008 4:58 pm
David - did you mean it’s now working great or not working great. Classic example of a typo messin with someones head. haha! Based on your comment and Zoltans response, I’m assuming you meant “now”. I’ll have to check it out, thanks.
David Mackey on August 8, 2008 6:12 pm
Yeah, sorry about that. It is now working great.
Zoltan Szendro on August 10, 2008 10:00 pm
Brad, Thank you for including my “likes” in your post.
David, I like your smooth implementation. This is one of the things I prefer in ShareThis. You can make it look completely part of your own design.
Brad Andersohn on August 11, 2008 1:23 am
David - no worries
Zoltan - thanks, I’m really looking at this closely and hoping to add this to our platform soon. Let me know when you find out more from ShareThis. Thanks.
Zoltan Szendro on August 11, 2008 10:25 am
Brad - I found this on RWW posted today: http://bit.ly/2I5686
It’s an overall statistics disclosed by ShareThis underlining the dominance of email sharing
Mike on August 12, 2008 1:45 am
You should really compare these two to AddToAny: http://www.addtoany.com
Their Share/Save widget is leaps and bounds better than AddThis and ShareThis. Look into their “smart” menu, it’s a pretty clever idea.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-to-any/
I used ShareThis for a sizable blog network on WordPress MU, but it slowed page loads down significantly. My recommendation is AddThis for the bare essential services (digg, delicious), AddToAny if you want people to share and save with *any* service as the name implies.
David Mackey on August 12, 2008 8:36 pm
Not a bad little app…but the site needs a refresh. It looks too hokey at this point for me to take it seriously. While the developer may be talented right now it says to me, “we are a one man shop.” Not something I want to make a core part of my site. :-/
Brad Andersohn on August 12, 2008 9:02 pm
Mike - good stuff, I’ll definitely check AddToAny.com out. Looks and sounds like a great tool. I am in the comparison stages right now and appreciate your input. Thanks.
Brad Andersohn on August 12, 2008 9:09 pm
David - it does look pretty plain and simple which could be a good thing, but coming across as a one man shop may not be good. If you read Zoltans comments, looks like Sharethis.com has a bit of funding and may not be going anywhere anytime soon…except up?!?
Bookmarking Service on the Web | GeekEstate Blog on August 12, 2008 11:03 pm
[...] Brad Andersohn: David - it does look pretty plain and simple which could be… [...]
Zoltan Szendro on August 13, 2008 12:04 pm
AddToAny looks good as well. It has email tool also through Feedburner, though not that obvious as ShareThis. Feature wise, all three look solid, and it seems that most of the missing ones can be duplicated by the others. I think the name of game here is scalability and nuances in features. Small implementation details will make one utilized by web users more than the other. At this point I prefer ShareThis due to its API and the flexibility of implementation options.
Crunchbase lists all of them, so all 3 are recognized by TechCrunch, with comparable traffic:
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/add-to-any
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/add-this
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/sharethis
AddThis has some jump recently, probably due to their recent Snap.com integration.
TechCrunch has some speculation about the $21M funding of ShareThis at http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/13/sharethis-raises-15m-a-lot-of-dough-for-one-widget/
Brad Andersohn on August 13, 2008 1:50 pm
Zoltan - you are such an asset and wealth of information. Thanks for contributing to this comparison. I appreciate you taking the time.
I was wondering if you had heard back or found out anything new about us implementing this into our AR platform and network. Even if individual members chose ShareThis, we still have the issue of embed codes on posts and the widget being added to the sidebar. Let me know what you find out. Thanks.
BTW - I did see the post from techcrunch already. Very interesting…
Mike on August 14, 2008 1:37 am
Great insight here. David yeah AddToAny’s site is very minimal. I get the same feeling from AddThis, but these are very simple “products” so I think minimalism is fitting.
Looking at Zoltan’s Crunchbase links, I was surprised to see that AddToAny has been around since 3/06! That and their updated blog has me less concerned about AddToAny’s longevity than AddThis.
ShareThis getting $21M is really interesting, but they’re looking to cram ads into their tool? No thanks. Like some of the comments implied in that post, their investors are never going to get that money back. But it makes me wonder if/how the other two make money… Zoltan?
Brad Andersohn on August 14, 2008 9:01 am
Mike - what makes you think the other two are making any money? There has to be a way to monetize their product or we all know that in time it’s Bye Bye. I too am interested in how ShareThis can make money without cramming in ads?
Slow Down and Fast on August 27, 2008 1:36 pm
I’ve started a blog on using social networking to promote our short film Slow Down and Fast. There are a lot of crossovers between independent filmmaking and other business models.
I’ve been trying to add the addthis button to our blogger blog and keep getting error code bX-w90v67.
The integration has been very easy for our website http://www.blindlylefilms.com/slowdown however I haven’t been able to figure out the problem with blogger.
I’ll try the sharethis button and see if it will work. Thanks for the tips.
Adam
Slow Down and Fast on August 27, 2008 1:40 pm
Just a quick update with sharethis and blogger.
Here is the message I got when trying to access the sharethis widget for blogger.
Currently our Blogger Plugin is not functioning due to a change in widget addition functionality on Blogger’s side. We have taken measures to fix the issue on our end and continue to monitor Blogger’s progress on correcting the issue.
If you’d like to be notified once the Blogger plugin is re-enabled, please send your email address to feedback@sharethis.com.
Adam
http://slowdownandfast.blogspot.com
Brad Andersohn on August 27, 2008 2:15 pm
I am unable to get the ShareThis widget to work on either the sidebar of our ActiveRain Blogs nor will the code work on posts. The widget shows up on the sidebar, but then disables and conflicts with the email link to that member.
When adding the widget code to a Blog post, only the code shows up and not the widget. I have been trying to work with some of their staff, but I don’t think they are understanding the issues the widget is causing.
I am still interested in using sharethis, but only if they can get it to work, otherwise, I’ll have to stick with the AddThis widget which is working 100% with no glitches or errors in either the widget or the code. Parked for now…