AddThis Widget Gathering Lots Of Interesting Data
You may have seen the AddThis buttons on blog at some point while surfing the web. It's a simple, free widget blog owners can add to their site that shows a number of bookmarking options at the end of a blog post (there's also a feed reader widget for easy RSS subscriptions).
Context & Ripple Effects
The AddThis button arrives mid-way through a syndication wave that analysts had already framed as decisive — one argued in mid-2006 that RSS was the most influential cultural shift of the post-2001 technical and business community precisely because it embodied sharing. Yet adoption was being throttled by friction: at the October 2005 Blog Business Summit, panelists pointed to industry-wide inconsistency when Molly Holzschlag couldn't even locate a site's RSS feed.
A single free widget that consolidates bookmarking and subscription options is a direct answer to that usability mess — and the confirmed catch is what it costs invisibly. Every installed button hands the widget operator a stream of data about what users share and read across thousands of independent blogs they would otherwise never see.
First-order effects
- Blog owners get a zero-cost fix for the scattered bookmark-and-subscribe experience flagged at the 2005 Blog Business Summit, with one snippet replacing a row of individual service buttons.
- AddThis gains a cross-blog vantage point no single publisher has: each embed reports which posts users bookmark and subscribe to, aggregating interest data across the long tail of the blogosphere.
Second-order effects
- Free distribution funded by collected data sets the price floor any rival bookmarking widget must meet — a competitor that charges bloggers, or offers less reach, competes against a product whose real margin comes from the data side.
- Aggregated sharing and subscription behavior becomes an asset in its own right, making the widget network attractive well beyond its utility to the blogs hosting it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, small embeddable third-party snippets harden into a de facto cross-site measurement layer controlled by intermediaries rather than the publishers who install them.
- The implicit bargain — publishers take a free convenience, operators take the behavioral data — points toward widget networks becoming advertising infrastructure, a tension the ongoing copyright and openness debates around syndication technology never anticipated.
The trend: RSS-era sharing utilities are quietly becoming cross-site data-collection infrastructure, with the widget economy exchanging publisher convenience for intermediary-held behavioral data.