ShareThis Archive

Earlier this month, ShareThis announced a new partnership with ExactTarget. This week the company rolled out a new widget (the formal announcement comes next week) which unlocks even more power when it comes to sharing content across the Web. This morning I sat down with ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel to discuss the new widget and how the company is doing.

ShareThis launched 15 months ago and currently has 2 million users a month and 100,000 websites actively using their widget (we are one of them). Sites from FoxNews to 1-800-flowers all use the ShareThis widget and each site uses the widget in a slightly different manner. The new widget pushes the concept of creating an account and Tim showed me that you can import your contacts into ShareThis from Gmail/Outlook/etc and then easily send people links. In fact the "send" option allows you to send one message which hits one person via email, one person via AIM, one via MySpace, etc. all at once – pretty nifty. The numbers of registered accounts are low but Tim says the registered number is growing each month.

We had a good discussion about placement of sharing icons and number of sharing icons. What I’ve found is that here on CN the usage of sharing is very low while on my other, more mainstream-oriented sites, the usage is higher. This is most likely due to the fact that early adopters have their own methods of sharing (bookmarklets, friendfeed, etc.).

I also asked about their business model and revenue. Tim said they are not earning revenue now but that they have lots of ways to better monetize sites for publishers and that the business model will be forthcoming late this year.

Here’s an example of the new share button – give it a try by sharing this story!

Social sharing service ShareThis and email marketing platform ExactTarget have announced a new partnership today. The companies aren’t sharing all of the details of the partnership except to say that the joint product will be available in the coming weeks.

They do note that the product will be, "focused on one-to-one communications and the sharing of content across social and personal networks." The ShareThis page on the ExactTarget platform calls the app a, "social email integration" so I am assuming it’s a way to add social share links (i.e. Digg, Reddit, etc.) to an email campaign.

ShareThis raised $15 million in March of last year. Check out a video demo of ShareThis we captured last year in NYC.

Online business optimization software provider (that’s their tagline!) Omniture announced last week a number of new partners for their Genesis program. Omniture Genesis brings together analytics and online marketing tools together under one customer dashboard. It’s interesting to see Omniture in the news while I rarely ever hear about WebTrends anymore.

The list of new partners is interesting because many of them are startups we’ve covered here on CN. The new partner list includes:

• Brightcove (our coverage)
• ClickTale (our coverage)
• Keibi (our coverage)
• ShareThis (our coverage)
• Visible Technologies (our coverage)

It’s a smart move for the startups - they gain a bit of visibility and a good deal of distribution. Omniture has a wide reaching customer base worldwide and could provide a spark for each of the startups.

Julie Smith of ShareThis presented at the Web 2 NY meeting last night. ShareThis is a Website and blog plugin that allows you to offer your readers a way to save content on their favorite services. Julie did speak to the ShareThis business plan. In 2008 their goal is adoption only, no revenue plan. In 2009, they will look to monetize ShareThis using potentially a combination of advertising and selling data since they log every click and save.

Here’s Julie’s demo:

These are the hottest startups on Killer Startups for the period ending April 18, 2007

Brightcove.com – The best in online video

At first glance, Brightcove might seem like just another YouTube, but it does have some nice additional features. For starters, it's an attractive, well-organized site that makes it easy to find what you're looking for by category, or just browsing. Also it has a weekly e-mail newsletter that brings you users' top picks. It has a good selection of TV clips and user provided videos. read more » (check out our other Brightcove coverage)

iStalkr.com – Social Feed Aggregator

iStalkr allows you to keep track of your friends' social feeds. See what they've recently listened to on Last.fm, or what new pictures they've posted on Flickr, or what their most recent tweet was about. People whose feeds you are keeping track of are the ones you are iStalking and the people who are tracking your feeds are your iStalkrs. It's like Twitter, but with more content from different sites from your favorite people for you to keep track of. read more »

ShareThis.com – The Site Formerly Known as Share2Me Redefines Sharing

ShareThis, formerly known as Share2Me, a bookmarklet for sending media across the web has launched HowYouShare, a promotional site with YouTube poster girl abbegirl enlisted as host. Simply install the bookmarklet, register, import all your contacts from FaceBook, AIM, and MySpace, and share. Whenever you come across something you're dying to share, just hit your ShareThis button. It's simple–register now for free. Start sharing, and save your stuff in your Sharebox to look at it later. read more »

Dealighted.com – Find all the hot deals for any product in one place

Looking to buy something? Find out the best deals that other people have stumbled upon, all on one site: Dealighted.com. The top sale deals are constantly being placed on the site's home page and in its searchable database which receives threads from various deal forums. You can search by tag, by forum, or by the hottest deals going on right now. As a registered member (which is free), you can save deals, make comments, or e-mail deals to friends. read more »

PDFfiller.com – Online Form Filler

Quite simply, PDFfiller allows you to fill out pdf files online without any downloading of software. Having been a part of a company that was searching for a solution to filling out PDF files while online, this is a site that ill prove to be an incredibly useful tool for lots of businesses with online representation. read more »