Social bookmarking widgets are absolutely everywhere, you see them on blogs, news, online retailers and even on government web sites. They have become one of the defining features of Web 2.0 design.
There are three major players in the social bookmarking widget world, AddThis, ShareThis and AddToAny. These three services together are seen by almost everyone on the internet every single day.
This begs the question, which one is best? As usual it depends on what your needs are and how you will be using it. However I’ll try to take away the dartboard selection process that you’re using now by providing some reviews and a performance comparison for these different services.
Performance chart
I started off by creating pages that contain absolutely nothing but the widget. With these completely empty pages I can get a much more accurate reflection on load time. I used Mozilla Firefox with the Firebug, YSlow, PageSpeed and Tamper Data add-on’s to to determine the number of connections, load time and weight for each widget. These are some of my recommended Firefox add-on’s for all web guys.
All of these tests are using the default button with the default settings for each service. I ran all of these tests from two locations in northern California. One set was run from my home 6Mbps ADSL connection and another set is run from my dual 30Mbps DS3 work connection. The results were basically the same from both locations. Both computers were Intel Qxxxx quad core systems with ample power.
These tests are not necessarily what you would expect average users to see but they offer a good comparison between the performance factors for each service.
The following table contains a breakdown of major points that I tested:
| AddThis | ShareThis | AddToAny | Tell-a-Friend | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DNS Requests | 2 | 6 | 3 | 2 |
| Initial HTTP Requests | 5 | 18 | 6 | 3 |
| Initial Weight | 20.7KB | 82.6KB | 20.9KB | 12.5KB |
| Initial Load Time (avg) | 460ms | 1.69s | 525ms | 477ms |
| Total HTTP Requests | 14 | 21 | 8 | 6 |
| Total Weight | 71.3KB | 82.8KB | 47.8KB | 22.8KB |
| Total Load Time (avg) | 1.52s | 2.34s | 538ms | 886ms |
| Window Load Time (avg) | 490ms | 460ms | 485ms | 480ms |
| Cookies | 10 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
Let me first take a moment to explain exactly what these values are. The initial items refer to the resources required to just display the widget button on the page, the total requests include the content loaded when you put your mouse cursor on the widget
- DNS Requests
The number of specific domains and sub domains that must be resolved to load the widget. Lower is better, but in the real world most users will already have these DNS entries cached in their browsers, especially AddThis. - HTTP Requests
The number of connections and independent client/server interactions that have to be made to load and render the widget. The initial requests will delay loading the rest of your page. - Weight
The download size of all of the scripts, CSS and images needed to display the content you see on the page. Again, in the real world you can expect much of this to be cached. - Load Time
The average time it takes to connect and download all of the content for the widget. - Window Load Time
The average time it takes before thewindow.onloadevent fires on my test pages with no cache. This is not execution time, it is just a point of reference that includes execution time. - Cookies
The number of cookies that the widget and/or its servers will set and force the browser to send back every time it makes an HTTP request. These add to the weight of the widget, but are not counted towards the weight in this test.
All of these services fail the YSlow and PageSpeed recommendations in some way or another. They have to sacrifice some cache performance for the ability to update the code on their end without requiring every publisher in the world to update the code on their site.
AddThis
AddThis Widget
By far the most popular social bookmarking widget on the internet today, AddThis set’s the standard that all of the other bookmarking widgets try to live up to. They have the largest user base, a massive collection of supported service, lots of display flexibility and have localized their widget into more than 50 languages. They also support SSL.
I have voiced some concerns about AddThis using some black-hat user tracking and profiling tactics. However, since they are so popular this service must get some love in this review.
Try it
Customization
The AddThis widget is also the most flexible in terms of layout and design. There are several basic templates and styles to choose from and the JavaScript that runs the widget supports numerous customizations. With a little CSS trickery you can completely control the look of your widget.
Performance
This widget scored very well in the performance testing for initial load, with low initial download and only 4 initial HTTP requests. However it has the second largest total download weight when your mouse crosses it with a total of 71KB of script, CSS and images.
Thoughts
I do like the look and feel of AddThis and love the extra levels of customization you get with this product. They have good documentation and have good performance. They’ve recently added clickback analytics which is a very nice feature indeed. Saves you the time of building bit.ly links and integrates click tracking back in to the analytics system.
If you care about your visitors privacy, do not use AddThis, the primary reason this widget exists it so mine data. They use black-hat tracking tactics and their privacy policy says that they can resell the data to anyone who wants it.
ShareThis
ShareThis Widget
The second most popular social bookmarking widget out there is ShareThis. The ShareThis widget is not as flexible as the AddThis widget and can be very difficult to customize beyond their widget creator. But it has other strong points. The ShareThis widget is supported by a service that users can sign up for. People logged into a ShareThis account will see their favorite social sites at the top of the widget. This is a pretty nice feature, for people who decide to sign up.
Try it
Customization
You can customize a couple levels display with a few different display options. You can of course choose and order the social site links that display in the hover view. However since the popup menu is displayed via an iframe there is absolutely no way to change the look and feel other than the very basic controls you get in the widget creator.
Performance
Unfortunately ShareThis has done quite poorly in the performance test. It has the largest initial download weight (by far) and the most initial HTTP requests. The initial weight is a whopping 83KB! Most of the initial weight comes from one large sprite and the MooTools JavaScript library. The sprite is fine, a JavaScript library is not. Granted both of these items will cache well, but you should not build a simple little widget on top of a JavaScript library, it’s a huge dependency that is 95% wasted on this product.
It takes a total of 18 HTTP requests to get the widget if the user does not have it in browser cache. Since it is so popular many people will have it cached but these requests will delay the loading of your page.
What really hurt was the initial load time. I should point out that the load time is skewed by the Google ad services and analytics calls that the script calls. It will render and display before the 1.69 second average initial load time, but since I tested load time not render time I have to factor in the tracking and ad code.
ShareThis sends two logging GET request as well as an AJAX POST request when it opens the sharing dialog, the ShareThis server requests tend to take around 220ms each which hurt the total load time even more. The Google analytics request only takes 45ms, which is the kind of speed they should be shooting for if they want this extra logging.
In my opinion even through the loading time doesn’t really reflect the render time, they still deserve a bad score because of this unnecessary logging and fat weight. Do you really need two separate logs every time someone happens to mouse over the button? Do you really need any?
Thoughts
Aside from their overzealous logging, ShareThis was actually quite a good contender. The widget has a good look and good functionality. However, the bad load time and the lack of customizations hurt.
AddToAny
AddToAny Widget
The AddToAny brings a couple nifty features to the table that are quite nice, it tracks how many shares a particular page has for each service and shows them in the Share / Save list.
They also have a “personalization” feature that displays services that individual visitors actually use up top. This is rather dubious because if they are doing what I think they are doing, then they are exploiting a security hole in the browser. Regardless, it is conceptually a brilliant feature that can be very useful.
Try it
Customization
The button itself is an image tag, so it’s easy to change that to anything you like. The widget creator lets you change the colors, but that’s about it. However, since the popup menu is not in a iframe you can control it’s look with CSS. The markup is well structured and has good ID and class identifiers. Their API offers some additional customization elements as well.
Performance
AddToAny did very well in the performance testing. It has the second highest initial weight, but that is due to one huge sprite with every logo imaginable. Its initial load time was right in the middle, not super-fast, not slow. However it had the fastest average total load time. The performance is fast and it is consistent. I had to give it 3 DNS requests because that’s how many it takes to load it, however one of those DNS requests is google-analytics.com, which basically every person on the internet will already have cached before they ever reach your site. Overall, the performance was very good.
Thoughts
If you ask me the popup share view is way too big. The bookmark tab is not very useful, in IE it gives you an “Add to Favorites” button, but in every other browser it simply says “Press Ctrl+D or ⌘+D to bookmark this page”, there isn’t much point. The search form? Why is it there? Who will search for their social site? If you press that little down-arrow under the social links it will display every social site that has been enabled. With the default settings this is a massive list which can mess with your site layout if you don’t expect it.
Tell-a-Friend
Tell-a-Friend Widget
The Tell-a-Friend widget from SocialTwist is the least known bookmarking widget in this review, but those who use it tend to like it so I felt they deserved a place in this article. Of all the widgets I’ve been giving serious consideration to, this is the only one with a pay version. There is of course a free version but the pay version does have several features that power users will want. It would seem that the primary focus of this widget is branding control for the client. You don’t get these advanced features in the free version so I cannot give you more details, but they have acquired some rather large clients (Disney, Barnes & Noble, Kraft Foods, etc.) who use the more advanced branding features.
Try it
Customization
The widget customization is pretty much limited to what you can build in the widget creator. The button itself is an img tag so you can replace that quite easily with any image you want. This widget doesn’t use an iframe for the hover windows so you can do a little bit with CSS, however the social media icons are inline styles so they cannot be changed.
They offer more customization in the pay version, but I wasn’t willing to shell out any cash for this test so I can’t comment on the quality or any additional flexibility.
They chose to go a different direction for the bookmarking and sharing functionality. When you click on an icon to share the widget opens a kind of large modal over the page, instead of simply clicking an image and getting redirected to the share form on the social site. This feature is part of their branding focus which allows paying clients to customize the sharing screen. But it absolutely dominates the window once it opens.
Performance
Surprisingly, the Tell-a-Friend widget was the one of the best in the performance comparison. It had the lowest initial download weight and the second fastest average initial load time. The images are served from a different sub domain than the JavaScript, they could literally cut their DNS lookups in half by putting the images and JS on the same CDN sub domain. But I can’t really complain about 2 DNS lookups. For some reason their script seems to have the longest execution time, average window.onload fires around 100ms later than AddThis or ShareThis.
The performance tests did not take into consideration the modal window. Since you have to take an action to open the window I didn’t feel it needed to be rated for performance. However I do want to note that it is quite large, with lots of scripts, CSS and images.
Thoughts
Tell-a-Friend is the only TRUSTe certified widget. They seem to have the best privacy practices.
“We take user privacy very serious. We do not profile users, store any personal information. Even the address book feature, others “import” we only let users view.”
Indeed, they don’t do any cookie based tracking and their low weight and fast response suggest that they are not doing any profiling on the back end. When it comes to user privacy they seem to be the winners.
I understand why they have a pay system in place, it’s the only business model that works for them. Unfortunately their free implementation feels like they’ve had to do extra work to reduce the usefulness of their product. The basic vs detailed analytics, not offering button customization and not offering modal customization. It all just feels too forced, especially when their competition is offering all of those features and more for free.
Personally, I refuse to enter my Twitter login information anywhere other than Twitter or my Twitter desktop application. However if you want to share to twitter via the Tell-a-Friend form you will have to enter your login information. It asks you to login to share for several other services as well. I can see this stopping many users dead in their tracks.
Features chart
All of the services that I’ve tested include support for just about every social media site ever made. Since I haven’t used every social media site ever made I can’t comment on the ones they are missing, however I will say that they all support every social media site you care about.
Every service also has it’s own integrated analytics system. All of these analytics systems are pretty good with pretty much the same metrics (shares, locations, services used, etc) and are easy to navigate. All except for Tell-a-Friend can support Google analytics integration and none except for ShareThis can support Omniture integration.
| AddThis | ShareThis | AddToAny | Tell-a-Friend | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every service you care about |  |
|
|
|
| Language Localization | (55) |
(5) |
(51) |
(18) |
| Analytics | |
|
|
|
| Google Analytics | |
|
|
 |
| Omniture Reporting | |
|
(?) |
|
| SSL Support | |
|
|
|
To be honest I never found any value in having the ability to share SSL pages, but it has been a deciding factor for some people. Really, why is a page that you want to share with everyone behind a secure connection?
Other mentions
- OnlyWire is another social bookmarking widget service that wants to play with the big boys. Unfortunately their free version has ads and I don’t think anyone will accept ads on their site just for a bookmarking widget. It also blew the performance tests with 42 initial HTTP requests and an initial weight of over 100KB.
- SocialList is a super-simple bookmarking widget. It doesn’t have analytics or any creation interface and near as I can tell it hasn’t been updated in over a year. But it is small and simple, so it does deserve a mention.
Winners
Of course each widget is better in different areas, so I can really only compare them with the performance tests and features.
Best performance – AddToAny
This was a difficult choice. For initial load performance Tell-a-Friend won for having the lightest weight, least HTTP requests and fastest response. But they failed the overall widget performance test because their form system is just so big and heavy. AddToAny wins the best overall performance despite having the heaviest total weight of all the widgets. Most of that weight is from a 26.8KB sprite with every logo ever made. But it caches well and does not seem to hurt performance.
Most customizable – AddThis
AddThis wins the customization contest hands-down. In some ways AddToAny is as good or better, but because of their “Toolbox” and list layouts you really can get a very good level of control over how the widget renders. They have more standard buttons and layouts than any of the other services and have more customization features.
Best end-user privacy – Tell-a-Friend
Of course, Tell-a-Friend with their decent privacy policy and lack of profiling wins the privacy competition. Most web masters don’t concern themselves with matters like this, but internet privacy is something that I consider very important. As much as I want to know who you are, I don’t presume the right to know everything about you just because you viewed my site. At the same time servers and dark-fiber aint cheap, and I need to make money off of you somehow.
Do you really need a bookmarking widget?
Before you go implementing one right this moment; please take a moment to ask yourself, do you really need a social bookmarking widget?
There are literally hundreds of social media sites out there, most of them you have never heard of and neither have any of your visitors. If your site serves a particular niche then it should be easy to identify the social media sites that you need to target. Just put up a couple icons and links. This will make your site load faster and make it easier to follow your presence on those social media sites. If someone wants to link your site on a social media service then not having a widget will not stop them.
If you do need to have an easy link for more than just a few social media sites then perhaps you do need one of these widgets.
Final thoughts
Any of these widgets are good choices, depending on your needs. Personally, I think AddThis has the best look and feel, but I hate their aggressive tracking strategy. I like the look and functionality of ShareThis but it’s too fat and users have to register to get the most out of it. AddToAny has good performance and is intuitive, but it is just so big. And Tell-a-Friend has nice branding tools but their big modal window is a bit cumbersome and it feels neutered unless you pay.
If I had to pick a widget right now it would probably be AddToAny, with a lot of thought given to AddThis.
Update (3/16): Re-tested all widgets and updated all of the performance numbers. Updated AddToAny customization information. Added thoughts on Tell-a-Friend privacy.
Update (3/19): Update language localization information. Added SSL support.
By:
Updated: Jun 5th, 2011
My GitHub
Hey Steve,
Thanks for posting your thorough analysis. It’s definitely one of the best I’ve seen to date.
AddToAny is 4 years old this month and it’s great to see the real-world results. I’m very proud that we’ve managed to keep our sharing platform speedy, highly customizable, and backwards compatible while avoiding the bloat that usually comes with a long life cycle. More exciting things are under way and, as always, performance will be first in mind.
Feel free to get in touch anytime if you have questions/thoughts about AddToAny, or if you post another awesome comparison.
Cheers,
Pat
@Pat, were you at SXSW? Steve & Erin from ShareThis and I were drinking pints on Monday night. Wish you were there.
@Steven, thanks so much for the really detailed analysis. Our team has been going through what you wrote point by point looking at the different ways that we can improve. We love the feedback.
I think one vector for comparison that I’d love to see added to your analysis is which actually drives the most shares. In the end, isn’t that the whole point? We’re here to get your content shared to every corner of the Social Web. We’ve tested every pixel of our interface to make sure that we can do that as best as possible.
In terms of performance, one thing to take into consideration is that, according to comScore, we reach 656 million people per month worldwide. This means that the majority of Web visitors already have our assets cached on their computers and won’t have to grab the whole load.
Additionally, if there is an extra concern about performance, we have the ability for someone to locally serve up the main AddThis JS. – http://addthis.com/help/code-caching
One feature that we have that you mentioned for some of the others is that we do auto-personalize the services listed in the menu based on your previous sharing history and browser locale. We currently support over 230 services (http://addthis.com/services) and have been working to successfully show the right services to the right person at the right time. – http://addthis.com/features#smartest
Oh oh and did you see our recent addition of clickback analytics that we’re providing? This is a REALLY cool feature and will be able to show the ROI on the shares that you’re getting.
http://addthis.com/blog/2010/03/11/clickback-analytics-measure-traffic-back-to-your-site-from-addthis/
A note on flash cookies… they were a legacy system that came over from our original flash widget platform Launchpad. After a lot of discussion internally and with our user community, we’re going to be moving to a traditional browser cookie.
We’re also going to be exposing menu DOM events that you could attach Omniture callbacks to. This is phase 1 of our Omniture integration.
Both of these updates will be coming, very soon so stay tuned.
Again, we greatly appreciate the feedback. Please stay in touch! – justin@clearspring.com
best,
-justin
@Pat
Thanks for getting in contact with me. I’ve acquired some good information about AddToAny from you. I’ve update the article to fix the original errors.
@Justin
Thanks for checking out my article. It’s really helpful for me to get your input on these tests, and I’m sure anyone who reads this will be glad to see you responding to the comparisons and pointing out featured which I failed to mention.
> I think one vector for comparison that I’d love to see added to your
> analysis is which actually drives the most shares. In the end, isn’t
> that the whole point?
Indeed, I couldn’t agree with you more, and this is something I am trying to organize.
However, this is a much more difficult, time-intensive and generally less-quantifiable test. Putting the different widgets on different sites and comparing page views to shares isn’t a good test alone because different sites have different types of viewers who may be more, or less, inclined to share, they have different layouts, which may be better designed to focus users on the sharing tools and different locales, which also greatly effects shares.
I’ve noticed that young people in east, and south-east Asia are at least 50% more likely to share via a widget then the same age group in the United States. So audience makes a huge difference.
What I am hoping to do is arrange a test on one site with lots of traffic and a varied audience (I have a test case in mind). But this test will take a very long time, I would need at least one month for each widget to get any kind of valid numbers. Four widgets will require four months. And that is only if I can get it approved.
I’m going to try to push forward with this because it really is the single most important metric, and is completely missing from this review. But don’t expect to see this test anytime soon.
> according to comScore, we reach 656 million people per month worldwide.
> This means that the majority of Web visitors already have our assets
> cached on their computers
Yeah, I made a note of that in the test metric descriptions as well. In a fully cached state all of the requests will return a 304 and not require a download.
The primary focus of this test was raw performance without the benefit of cache. But it is worth pointing out that in the real world the resources for both AddThis and ShareThis are very likely to be cached due to their prolific adoption.
> One feature that we have that you mentioned for some of the others is
> that we do auto-personalize the services listed in the menu based on
> your previous sharing history
I’ll add a note about that.
> Oh oh and did you see our recent addition of clickback analytics that
> we’re providing?
Yeah, this is a great feature. I’ll add a mention about this as well.
> A note on flash cookies… they were a legacy system that came over from
> our original flash widget platform Launchpad. After a lot of
> discussion internally and with our user community, we’re going to be
> moving to a traditional browser cookie.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear this. This was a dirty tactic that I did not agree with at all. Please let me know when you take it out and I’ll update the article.
Just had to post a “thank you” for this incredibly detailed review. I’ve been using Sexy Bookmarks (because I want to be sexy, I suppose, which is tough for a geeky old white guy) but I’m working on a new website and thought I’d take a look at a different bookmarking widget.
I was leaning toward AddToAny, did a search, found your review, and really appreciated the time and effort you put into it (I have a software engineering background). So, thanks. I’m going to give AddToAny a shot and see how it works out.
Pat
P.S. I wish you had “Subscribe To Comments” or a similar plugin installed.
@Justin,
It was good to meet you in Austin for drinks, we will have to do round 2 next time you are out in the Bay Area.
@Steve,
First on localization: you marked us as an X here, but we recently shipped the widget in 5 languages: Spanish, German, Italian, French and (of course) English. We have several more that have been crowd-sourced from our community and will launch soon.
Second, on performance: We understand that load times are a big issue for publishers, and we are currently working on streamlining the widget for that initial load. However, once a user had our widget cached, the load time is significantly shorter. We often perform poorly on speed tests because they aren’t done with the widget in cache, but we reach over 400 million users, so in real world situations this is rarely the case. If you want more technical details about this you can read about it here:
http://forums.sharethis.com/topic.php?id=2453
If you have any questions about this, feel free to contact me at sragan@sharethis.com or on twitter @steversb
@Partick
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve played with Sexy Bookmarks as well and it is a good WordPress plugin. I’ve never thought about putting up a subscribe to comments system before, perhaps it is time. :)
@Steve R
Hi Steve! Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my article.
> First on localization: you marked us as an X here, but we recently shipped
> the widget in 5 languages: Spanish, German, Italian, French and (of course)
> English.
Oops. I’ve fixed that now, sorry about missing it.
> Second, on performance: We understand that load times are a big issue for
> publishers, and we are currently working on streamlining the widget for that
> initial load. However, once a user had our widget cached, the load time is
> significantly shorter.
Indeed, cached performance is an important factor, but it’s not usually the best gauge for performance. A 500k script in cache loads about as fast as a 500B script from cache, but that doesn’t mean that they score the same in a performance benchmark.
But it is important to note that in the real world, yes, many visitors will already have the resources for ShareThis in their local cache.
I still think that performance isn’t something that should be undervalued just because everyone has DSL and more browser cache than they did in the old days. You can’t guarantee that someone has resources cache, but you can guarantee that they will need to download it again, periodically.
THANK YOU!
I work with SocialTwist.com, the company behind Tell-A-Friend. Your review was very fair and balanced, as much as could be gained without having the benefit of inside information. I would like to point out that we have over 67,000 sites and blogs worldwide using Tell-A-Friend, with over 3.2 *billion* widgets served.
The key differentiators from competitors in our paid version (which starts at $99 a year) include:
• Only Tell-A-Friend provides a turn-key social media referral platform that integrates social messaging with advanced marketing logic AND integrated analytics
• Only Tell-A-Friend offers a personal address book import function, greatly improving pass-along performance
• Only Tell-A-Friend can bring dynamic content from any specific page into the outbound message, using relevant photos and copy to dramatically increase the click-thru rate
• Only Tell-A-Friend delivers consolidated reporting on user activity across all social media channels, giving deep marketing insights
I hope this clarifies some of the distinctions and advantages of our Tell-A-Friend platform. And yes, privacy is a primary concern to us, which is why we’re also the only TRUSTe certified referral marketing provider.
Cheers,
Mike Crosson
VP of Sales
SocialTwist.com
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the information! Indeed, those are some interesting features. I know the other services have some similar features, but are not as focused on the marketing aspect. I’m sure that is a big selling point to businesses that want as much branding control as possible.
Hey Steven,
Wanted to chime and let you know that ShareThis launched a new widget today. It’s about 80% smaller than before, with 50% fewer calls and an initial load of 26k. Also has some new features, like a less cluttered UI, a search box to find almost any social channel, and an automated service that customizes for each users sharing habits.
Check out the ShareThis blog, they just posted more info about it.
~ Victoria
http://blog.sharethis.com/2010/05/27/sharing-widget-faster/
Much better!
The optimizations look great. They make the widget much snappier and quicker to download. Now the widget will have much less of a page weight impact on pages that use it. This will even be an SEO improvement for ShareThis user since Google now counts page speed into its rankings.
Huge improvement for the ShareThis widget. Thanks for taking the time to optimize it.
I’ll have to re-profile the widgets and do another full test, eventually.
Very useful comprehensive review, thank you. will be back for more soon.
May I add that AddToAny offers two widgets: one for sharing page and the other for subscribing to feed. If you add both of them, the statistics you mentioned in the table above will change significantly.
Yeah, that is true. But you don’t see nearly as many subscribe widgets out there, compared to the prevalence of sharing widgets. If you put both of the AddToAny widgets on one page you will see a significant drop in performance compared to the other widgets.
However this whole comparison is based on the default sharing widget from each company. So the subscription widget didn’t get tested.
Thanks Steven for this comparison chart.
We were looking for the best share script, and still modifying our conclusions.
We were using addtoany, but cause of a privacy issue, we drop them down.
Now we are using AddThis, but its not what we want, so for now we are trying to do a code caching..
Maybe tell-a-friend is the best answer..
What a review, thank you, Steven! It is good to see comments from every vendor! After reading your post and the comments I did my own tests since it has been a while since your review. We ended up going with AddToAny for the better performance (still) and we love how nicely customizable it is. They have standalone icons now too.. which makes me wonder why you are still using single icons only, and why do you have Facebook last?!
Very useful comparison. Here’s a new great bookmarking widget: ShareThisUp.com
ShareThis has made some significant optimizations since this test. Eventually I’ll do another comparison, not sure when that’s coming though.
That was a great comparison. You might find interesting our brand new sharing platform E-mailit.com
Thanks Steven for the fantastic comparison.
Best Part is to keep it simple:
There are literally hundreds of social media sites out there, most of them you have never heard of and neither have any of your visitors. If your site serves a particular niche then it should be easy to identify the social media sites that you need to target. Just put up a couple icons and links. This will make your site load faster and make it easier to follow your presence on those social media sites. If someone wants to link your site on a social media service then not having a widget will not stop them.
We used ShareThis but after a few months we moved our site to AddThis. You can read this story here http://a.sw.io/YFOCjcY
hi to all, having spend over 15 years on web, whats the point of having a mouse over pop up window in your site that shows 50 icons most of them you have never seen?
The point is that companies like add this etc advertise on your site free… and you are getting thing you really dont need… (how much is helping social sharing web sites is an other issue… )
so my opionion is go for something simple and fast, ad free, registration free, simple cut and paste like My Share Bar and stop sending to social bookmarking services trafic and money, its your site you have to focus.
info about my share bar you can find here
http://www.tecorange.com/index.php/download-free-open-source-software/78-my-share-bar-facebook-twitter-google-1-mail-print-buttons-for-web-sites
GL!
Great review. Thank you.
Hi Steven,
This is a great effort…. Hope you would you be able to slip in some hours to redo the analysis for 2012….
Steven,
Good article! You should really conciser making an update, or a new article all together. AddThis is making a lot more requests and added even more tracking to their .js.
Maybe title it:
“SEO Perspective on AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny, Tell-a-Friend and Other Similar Sharing Services”
or:
“Website Performance Impact using AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny, Tell-a-Friend and Other Similar Sharing Services”
:)