ShareThis, a handy little widget that site managers can install to make it easier for readers to share and save Web pages, is preparing for a new release that gives the service Digg-like powers.
The service's user interface, which lets people post items they like to dozens of services, such as Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and plain old e-mail, is also getting a graphical and performance refresh designed to make it simpler to use. (See story, "ShareThis and the stealth business model," for a look at the current version of the product.)
The real power is the new ShareThis page that reports on what people are sharing with their friends. As I said, there's a Digg-like element to this. But while Digg only ranks the stories that people send to Digg, ShareThis can track what people are sending to Digg, Reddit, MySpace, and dozens of other services. Also, ShareThis is egalitarian--the ShareThis button appears on every story on more than 60,000 sites, CEO Tim Schigel claims.
The service will also soon get new group features. When you're in the process of sharing a story, it will also show you other similar stories that your friends (people you've shared with in the past) have also shared. Schigel has commissioned research that shows that adding general-sharing functions to a site increases readership by 3 percent and that ShareThis in particular does so by 6 percent.
New, improved pop-up ShareThis menu.
If people begin to use the ShareThis aggregation page to find sites and stories to read, it will kick off a virtuous cycle of site managers installing the widget to get onto the aggregation page, and the aggregation page potentially driving traffic back to the sites.
ShareThis can also provide analytics on sharing, showing site managers which stories are the most shared and what services they are shared on. (I'd love to get this data for my work.)
The service also has a browser plug-in for FireFox, but the product's real power comes from the widget that publishers are voluntarily installing in their site templates.
There are other sharing widgets out there, like AddThis, but I continue to be impressed by ShareThis. It's unobstrusive and functional. Site managers seem to be adopting it as the default sharing widget on new and existing sites. And now the company is planning to leverage that growth in a new and interesting direction. It's smart.
What remains to be seen is whether the company will succeed financially. Schigel explained his revenue ideas to me in a meeting in January, and repeated them last week when we met again. But he still hasn't turned them on. I'm concerned that he may be building a powerful and important online service that won't actually make any money; in my opinion, companies should begin beta testing their business models as soon as their product begins to attract loyal users.
The new ShareThis will show you how many times the things you share are shared by others. There will also be a Digg-like page showing what's being shared around the Web.
ShareThis plans to put the updated service into very limited private beta on October 6. First 100 people to e-mail beta@sharethis.com with "Webware: beta" in the subject will get access to some of the new functionality at that time, through a Firefox plug-in.
We're big fans of the ShareThis button here at Webware. It's tiny and speedy when it comes to bookmarking or passing along interesting content you find on the Web to others. However, one thing it doesn't offer is a way to skin it to match your site. Enter Siphs, an unfortunately named, but useful tool for blog or site owners to help their users share and bookmark content while keeping tabs on what's getting the most play.
Siphs does everything ShareThis does including the option to brand the sharing page to match your blog or Web site. As well as a metrics service to let you track which services users are clicking, and see detailed numbers of shares for each. Compared with ShareThis, it's not nearly as seamless, since it jumps users to an offsite page full of sharing links, but it still manages to get the job done effectively.
Track what services people are using to share your content with Siphs.
(Credit: Siphs, LLC)Siphs has four levels of service, a free personal version, and three paid iterations that run off an annual subscription and offer template customization, click statistics, and an increased volume in the number of e-mails your users can send to share your content. The premium service also offers site owners leads on who's clicking the links in the e-mails in case you feel like wooing them over to your site with the integrated address book.
I've embedded the Siphs button (without branding) below. Feel free to try it out.
Update: This post has been amended to fix the erroneous statement that ShareThis doesn't offer metrics tracking or branding options (which it does).
ShareThis makes a very useful service that might be sheltering a real business.
Let's deal with this product first, since it's quite good. ShareThis makes a widget that any content publisher can use on his or her sites. It gives users a very easy way to share a story they are reading with a site like Digg or Reddit, or with individuals via their social network, or through e-mail or instant message. And it beats littering a blog template with a dozen buttons that appear on every story.
Press the little button for sharing options.
(Credit: AllThingsD Web site)ShareThis takes this feature to gratifying extremes. If you want to share a story via Facebook, ShareThis can read in your Facebook contact list, so that addressing a message is a simple matter of selecting a user from a drop-down friends list. Users can also save ShareThis profiles, so that no matter where on the Net they go, if the site uses ShareThis, their preferences and their address books copy over. (There's also a ShareThis bookmarklet, which can be used on any site anywhere).
It's handy, but so far, maybe not so exciting. Where ShareThis becomes more than just a fancy widget, and edges into possible business viability, lies in its collection and treatment of data about its users' activities. ShareThis knows which stories users engage with--the ones they forward and save. Compared with Google, ShareThis gets more interesting data from Web surfers. Although somewhat less of it.
You can tell which of your content is getting shared.
CEO Tim Schigel is giving ShareThis away to publishers, along with valuable tracking and usage data. He hopes to monetize this function via very targeted advertising. "We're not doing it yet," Schigel told me, but he's an experienced online ad man, and convinced that the deep data he'll get from ShareThis widgets will equal big bucks.
Given mass adoption of his service, he'll be proven right. ShareThis will be able to deliver ad messages at the point of action--when a user is about to share a file--and with full awareness of the content they are most interested in. Of course, there's mass adoption and there's mass adoption. ShareThis may lock up some big accounts (major publishing brands) which will earn it a nice income, but the really big play requires ubiquitous presence everywhere, from the New York Times to the "long tail" of all online content.
See also: Addthis. Compare with content recommendation widget Sphere. And see our previous coverage of ShareThis, back when it was called Share2Me.
I've embedded the ShareThis widget for this story here:
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