Two Sharing Buttons Reviewed : Article : Nora Brown Design's Client Blog

Two Sharing Buttons Reviewed

In his book Building Findable Websites, Aarron Walter lists “encouraging users to share your content with others” as an excellent way to make you site more findable. One easy way to do that is by implementing a sharing button. There are several services out there that provide such buttons, including ShareThis.com and AddThis.com.

ShareThis.com

For a long time I preferred ShareThis, as it was extremely easy to implement and the sharing options popped up as a sort of tool tip, rather than a full-blown pop-up window.

However, though the list and order of sharing services is totally customizable, the button itself is not. I got tired of having that little green button sully my site design (~~see example on the left of this page~~ since replaced with AddThis). I found this tutorial, but couldn’t get it to work without plunking the javascript right into my html. Ugly. In general, I found ShareThis’s api difficult to understand.

Other disadvantages: it is not totally intuitive how to turn on or view sharing statistics, and by my YSlow count, ShareThis adds a whopping 22 http requests to your webpage.

AddThis.com

Enter AddThis.com, which has recently improved their API: their button and their new toolbox are highly customizable. Best of all, you can create the button unobtrusively and following the principles of progressive enhancement.

I especially like the AddThis Toolbox. It is easy to change what individual services appear, so you can specify a few of the most popular sharing methods, such as email, twitter, and facebook, and bunch the rest in a nice-looking popup. You can even customize the email template used for sharing via email.

Sharing Analytics seem fairly automatic with AddThis, and full-featured, and AddThis makes half the http requests that ShareThis does (though still too many): 11.