jeffwongdesign

Looks like YouTube is jumping on the 32×32 icon trend. It’s nice to see a movement towards larger affordances. It’s just so much easier to click/touch.

You can get your own set of 32×32 icons from AddThis.

We recently updated the AddThis homepage. The focus was to simplify the page without losing functionality and features. Ultimately, the metric of success was to make it easier for publishers to grab the code and increase conversions. As you can see, the homepage is as simple and focused as it can be. And based off our AB test, this was the winner.

In addition, we’ve updated our Get AddThis page. Before, it was a multi-step process. To accommodate new features and make it easier to toggle options, we went with a WYSIWYG model. We explored several ways to get the code, and this seemed to be the most straightforward and user friendly.

Huge kudos to our team who pulled the dev and testing together for this. These are arguably the most important front facing pages of our product, since they’re at the top of the funnel. I look forward to sharing the results of our next tests.

AddThis has updated its Service Directory to show not only top services based on shares, but also top services based on clicks and viral lift.

Currently, Facebook is the #1 service used for sharing, followed by Twitter and Email on the AddThis platform. However, what you may not know is that Facebook and Twitter are not the most viral.

What makes content viral? It’s simple—when someone shares something, it gets seen by many people (measured in clicks). So for example, if someone shares a page and it gets clicked on hundreds of people, it has a huge viral lift. On the other hand, if someone shares a page and no one clicks on it, the page has no viral lift. Surprisingly, Facebook isn’t a top 10 viral service (it’s ranked #12, and has 240% viral lift). And if you’re wondering, Twitter is ranked #19 (and has 150% viral lift).

Ultimately, more viral lift = more traffic back to your site.

So, what are the most viral services?

#1. Bleetbox
Viral Lift: 12,578%
Top Country: USA
Bleetbox is a browser based chat application that allows you to chat with anyone, about anything, anywhere on the Web.

#2. Email
Viral Lift: 3,945%
Top Country: USA
AddThis menu email service with address book integration (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, and more).

#3. Hacker News
Viral Lift: 1,284%
Top Country: Poland
Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company.

#4. Wykop
Viral Lift: 739%
Top Country: Poland
1. Explore 2. Share with Others 3. Rate 4. Discuss

#5. Nujiji
Viral Lift: 632%
Top Country: Netherlands
On NUjij, readers are the editors. Anyone can link to interesting, fun and exciting items, and respond to the news of the day.

#6. Svejo
Viral Lift: 630%
Top Country: Bulgaria
Bulgarian social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

#7. Reddit
Viral Lift: 388%
Top Country: USA
Reddit is a social news website on which users can post links to content on the Internet. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to become more or less prominent on the home page.

#8. Dzone
Viral Lift: 348%
Top Country: USA
DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers. Anyone can submit new links to the incoming queue, members vote on upcoming links to determine what gets promoted, and everyone can browse, search and comment on links.

#9. StumbleUpon
Viral Lift: 338%
Top Country: USA
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more.

#10. Diggita
Viral Lift: 268%
Top Country: Italy
diggita.it is a site of social publishing managed collectively by subscribers, all content is generated directly and democratically voted on by readers.

Huge kudos to the team for gathering all this data. It’s exciting to see that Facebook, while awesome, is far from being the end-all-be-all solution for sharing and making content viral.

This is by far one of the sexiest custom implementations of AddThis I’ve seen. While it uses a “ShareThis” logo, it uses all the features and icons created by AddThis. They created this by using our API. Huge Kudos to the designers and developers to created the site and custom AddThis implementation.

I even like the texture background they added to our inline expanded menu. 🙂 Hat tip: Matt

Here’s an infographic about privacy policies. It’s interesting to see the most common words… these are the same things I have to think about when designing the AddThis product and site. Hat tip: Jim and Mashable

After our awesome Q1 meeting, our entire team (east coast, west coast and everything between) went bowling. Here are some of the highlights of our evening. Thanks to everyone who could make it out. It was a fun way to start a great year.

Transporting the team to the bowling alley.

Peggy explains the rules of the tournament to the teams.

Mike clears his mind, and prepares to throw a turkey (3 consecutive strikes).

Robert throws a strike of his own, executed with immaculate form and surgical precision.

Will provides real-time color commentary.

Aaron suffers the endless shame of missing a spare.

The finals were won by a microscopic margin. Victory is sweet.

The official 2011 champions.

Check out the rest of the gallery. ^_^