There are a couple of really great tools you can use on your Blog posts. One is Addthis.com and the other is ShareThis.com. Both have some great features for the growing Social Bookmarking phenomena. I wanted to share them both and at the same time get your opinion as to which is better and why. Here’s a conversation I had with Zoltan from RealBird about ShareThis. I currently use Addthis, but am considering a change.

Add This Screen Shot:

Share this Screen Shot:


Quote from Zoltan:

Brad – I saw that you are using AddThis on your blog. Many large blogs have addthis.com like Techcrunch and many large ones have ShareThis like Mashable, Problogger and others. They are direct competition to ShareThis. I was using them as well on some of my sites, but I switched to ShareThis for many reasons:

  1. My personal (!) preference – i like the design, the button (especially the rotating icon) and the overall implementation better.
  2. When I deployed them on the RealBird listing sites (10,000+) ShareThis was very eager to help and assist.
  3. Has a neat javascript API, which helped me with some of the non-trivial (AJAX) implementations, where the Url to share changes and I need Javascript to update the button’s parameters on -the-fly.
  4. ShareThis has a built in email sharing as well – which turned out to be the most used sharing mechanism for some of our deployments according to ShareThis statistics.
  5. The word “Share” implies more, than “Add this” for consumers. ShareThis also allows you to use the code with any custom links, buttons and HTML objects through their javascript API.
  6. ShareThis raised a lot of money, which implies to me that they are well-positioned to be around for a longer time and should be up for something big. How can they justify raising $21 million otherwise ?

So which is it going to be? I like the 6 points made from my friend Zoltan, and I am heavily leaning toward the ShareThis option. Do you use these tools? Are you sharing and Social Bookmarking? What’s your take on these two competitors and their products? I’m always looking for better ways to help readers and Bloggers get the most out of their online experiences.