jeffwongdesign

One of my coworker’s pointed out another AddThis knockoff… and it’s pretty shameless—they’ve copied some of the design elements down to the pixel. It’s one of my older designs, so I don’t really care… but I wanted to point out that he he literally screen snapped our header and button, and recycled it for his site.

His Header

AddThis Header

His Button (apparently he likes pink… hmmmm…)

AddThis Button

As you can see, I designed this way back in February, 2009.

Anyway, I was flattered. Well, back to work. We’ve got some innovative things coming soon, so I’m not worried. Hat tip: Foo

**Update**
The website owner of Email-it.com has updated their header, shortly after my blog post. If you click on the comments, you’ll notice that he left me a couple of messages expressing how he felt offended by my post, and requested me to remove it. I respectfully declined, but promised to update the post with his updated header. He responded with some kind words, and was diplomatic.

As you can see, his new header looks much cleaner, and I like the design. I’m looking forward to his future designs, as we innovate the sharing space.

This is the original data I used to create the visualization. When you look at it, Facebook is clearly the dominant service used on AddThis. The most social butterflies are using Facebook, followed by Email. When someone asks how people are sharing on AddThis, this is what it looks like.

Jim wrote a blog post for AddThis this past friday describing his favorite service with AddThis for Firefox/IE/Chrome. I figure I’d post my personal favorite services. I use a lot more, but these are the ones I use the most.

  Gmail
  Tumblr
  Instapaper
  Facebook
  Twitter

This is what AddThis for Chrome looks like, and it’s what I’m using right now. (Nice job Dylan!) I love how it’s a nice tight vertical menu.

If you’d like try them out, you can download the plugins here:

I was going through my Facebook and Twitter updates and saw that Hooman (our CEO) said that Orkut was getting some real traction on AddThis’s sharing platform. This is huge accomplishment for them because it was just recently added to our service directory on November 13, 2009 (just under 2 months ago).

In disbelief, I checked out the AddThis Service Directory and the data doesn’t lie. Typically Facebook is #1 in almost every country, and makes up 28% of all of the sharing on AddThis… but you’ll notice that it’s #7 in Brazil. Check it out:

It’s wild to see a service that’s not Facebook or Twitter dominate sharing in a country like Brazil. You’ll see other data released from other sharing widgets claiming that Email is the most used service in the world, but that’s just a generalization of data. There is a wide spectrum of social networks that are popular around the world like Orkut, just as there are different people with different tastes, different friends and different trends.

Just to put things in perspective, Orkut is moving up so fast that it’s #14 on the AddThis sharing platform, above email services like YahooMail and Gmail. As much as I’m a huge user and fan of Facebook and Twitter, they’re not the alpha and omega of social networking or sharing. Yes they’re enormous, but there are other niches out there. It’s interesting to see Orkut thrive in a misunderstood ecosystem.

Meanwhile, In the United States, Orkut is not on the top 20 list. I’d like to openly ask if anyone knows why Orkut is so successful in Brazil and not the US. Obviously Orkut is connecting people in Brazil in ways that no other service is.

You’ll also notice that Orkut has some growing presence in India, as it is #11 over there.

Huge kudos to our friends at Orkut. I guess it’s time for me to start my account and connect with the People in Brazil. FYI, I’m hoping to start Brazilian Jiujitsu again in March… I’ve been out of practice for the last two years. For those of you who may or may not know, I’m a blue belt. ^_^

#3: Be Casual
We’re moving into what I call the era of the “Casual Web” (and casual content creation). This is much bigger than the hobbyist web or the professional web. Why? Because people have lives. And now, people with lives also have broadband. If you want to hit the really big home runs, create services that fit in with—and, indeed, help—people’s everyday lives without requiring lots of commitment or identity change. Flickr enables personal publishing among millions of folks who would never consider themselves personal publishers—they’re just sharing pictures with friends and family, a casual activity. Casual games are huge. Skype enables casual conversations.

Nice blog post by Evan Williams. Rule #3 seemed to stick with me, since I’ve been reflecting on AddThis’s design and experience.

It’ll be interesting to see how the “casual” theme plays out with AddThis and the world of sharing. It makes me think about how people really share content.

For example, I was moved when I read a blog recently that talked about “Killing ShareThis”. The blogger definitely didn’t like ShareThis (one of our competitors), nor did any of his readers. In short, the comments following the blog revolve around how sharing widgets seem impersonal and turned them off. I couldn’t help myself from agreeing… sharing, in general, could be a better experience. Which brings me to…

#6: Be Self-Centered
Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires. (But don’t trick yourself into thinking you are your user, when it comes to usability.) Another aspect of this is to not get seduced into doing deals with big companies at the expense or your users or at the expense of making your product better. When you’re small and they’re big, it’s hard to say no, but see #4.

This year, I hope to bring a little warmth to the world of sharing… to empower people to connect with their friends in meaningful ways, make new friends with similar interests, and give influences real web presence.

I’ve got a great feeling about this year, and I’m really looking forward to exploring the possibilities.

Hat Tip: Jim Lane. Great find!

I created a quick logo for our developer’s page on our Firefox Add-on page. Instead of putting up typical team photo, I thought it’d be fun to use our AddThis logo avatar. The idea was to make it look like a developer. Here’s the AddThis nerdy logo I whipped up:

Here’s the time lapse video that shows how I created it. The music was selected by Foo. Can you guess where it’s from? ^_^