The AddThis Blog

The AddThis WordPress Plugin now allows you to easily track Address Bar sharing. When activated, we now allow you to track and see how people are sharing your site when they copy the URL and paste it in an e-mail, instant message or anywhere else. To activate it, upgrade to the latest version of the plugin and check out the Advanced Tab.

Address Bar Sharing currently works in Firefox 4 and Safari 5. We also added Real Time Social Analytics as well.

We also have tested the plugin with the WordPress 3.2 Release Candidate and everything looks good.

If you notice any problems, make sure to head on over to the AddThis forum.

In our continuing efforts to provide you with the best service possible we’re doing big upgrades to our data center. Unfortunately this means that sometimes we’ll have to take services down to move them to bigger and better boxes. We have a downtime scheduled for Wednesday, June 15th between 4AM EDT and 7AM EDT (8 AM to 11 AM GMT). The following services will be unavailable during this window:

• AddThis.com
• The support forums
• Analytics.

Sharing will still be available and analytics will still be collected. We’ll be updating our status page (http://status.addthis.com/) to let everyone know what’s going on during this move.

Thanks in advance for your patience and for using AddThis!

We highly recommend making your way over to the Clearspring blog to read Part 3 of our Big Data Architecture blog series.

The latest post describes the distributed query system we use to quickly access terabytes of data that is distributed across hundreds of machines. The query subsystem is comprised of two key components, QueryMaster and QuerySlave.  A single cluster can have multiple QueryMasters and each processing node in the cluster will have one or more QuerySlaves.

Also, if you need catching up, here are Parts 1 and 2.

In our continuing efforts to provide you with the best service possible we’re doing big upgrades to our data center. Unfortunately this means that sometimes we’ll have to take services down to move them to bigger and better boxes. We have a downtime scheduled for Friday, June 10th between 4AM EDT and 7AM EDT (8 AM to 11 AM GMT). The following services will be unavailable during this window:
AddThis.com
The support forums
Analytics.

Sharing will still be available and analytics will still be collected. We’ll be updating our status page (http://status.addthis.com/) to let everyone know what’s going on during this move.

Thanks in advance for your patience and for using AddThis!

Today we are excited to be a launch partner for Google’s +1 button for
websites. As the largest sharing network, we clearly understand how to
process social sharing data at massive scale. Publishers now have the option
to easily install the +1 button via AddThis.com, our WordPress Plugin, and
our client API.

Once you’ve installed our code on your site, analytics on the efficacy of
the +1 button will start showing immediately via your analytics dashboard.
These analytics will be integrated with your other social sharing analytics
to give you a complete view into the performance of your content.

The +1 button helps your content stand out in Google search results by
giving your visitors the ability to recommend your content to others quickly
and easily. The more chances you give your users to +1 your content, the
more likely your URLs show up in search results with +1 annotations, thus
helping users discover results recommended by their friends and other
contacts.

Learn how to get +1 for your website by visiting the +1 features page.

At AddThis, we’re always trying to make our analytics more informative and useful. This week we’re adding a feature to help keep you abreast of changes in your site’s traffic: email alerts. Alerts notify you by email when there are significant changes to the rate of shares or traffic. Alerts can be set up for specific URLs on your site, a specific domain, or all domains in an AddThis profile.

AddThis alerts have a couple of great uses. First, like our analytics emails, they can help you keep a pulse on the the overall state of sharing for your sites—with domain-wide alerts you can be on top of any noteworthy change in your site’s traffic.

Perhaps the more powerful way to use alerts is setting one for a specific page that you’re interested in.  Say you’re making a new blog post and you want to know what the Social Web thinks of your literary masterpiece. Create an alert for the post’s URL and we’ll let you know when it goes viral. You’ll find a link to create an alert at the top of every content detail report.

To learn more about setting alerts, check out this help page, or head over to Settings to get started.

11:18am EST – We have deployed a fix.  Sharing to Twitter should be working fine again.  Let us know if you’re finding any issues.

9:20am EST – Good morning, we’re getting reports from users that they are having problems with sharing to Twitter. Our team is investigating. We’ll report back soon with more information.

We’ve updated the AddThis for Joomla plugin to now support Joomla 1.6. We’ve also integrated options for the AddThis share counter, which can be found in the Settings area.

Are you a user of Joomla and have feedback or feature requests? Please post them in the comments below.

Also, be sure to check out all our great sharing tool plugins on our Sharing Tools page!

We consider ourselves to be quite an open and transparent bunch here at AddThis. Which is why we thought it was a no-brainer to create a status page to give our users up-to-date information on any issues or outages. When and if a problem arises, it will be documented on the status page along with any helpful links to the forum or other relevant documents. This page will also be available for subscription via RSS.

Of course, be sure to continue to stay informed here on the blog and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for new feature announcements, great tips on using AddThis and job postings!