AddThis Toolbox Gets the Facebook “Like” Button
Social sharing widget-maker AddThis is enabling users to integrate the Facebook “Like” button by adding a single line of code to the AddThis Toolbox. — AddThis is now used on 1.2 million websites. It's a familiar catch-all sharing button …
Context & Ripple Effects
AddThis has spent three years turning its catch-all sharing button into a data business — TechCrunch noted as early as 2007 that the widget was gathering lots of interesting clickstream data, and the service now sits on 1.2 million websites. The move follows its earlier work exposing per-URL share counts, when SnowBlog documented the mechanics of the Facebook sharecount button in September 2009.
The timing is not accidental: this lands two weeks after Facebook's f8 conference and days after the company's late-April push to open user data to third-party applications, including an Instant Personalization rollout that defaulted to opt-out rather than opt-in. One analyst argued on April 30 that it is already too late to effectively regulate Facebook following those data-opening changes — a one-line integration reaching over a million independent publishers is exactly the kind of distribution that made that claim.
First-order effects
- Publishers on AddThis's 1.2-million-site network can now deploy Facebook's Like button with a single line of code, collapsing what was previously a per-site implementation task into a default checkbox in the AddThis Toolbox.
- Facebook gains Like-button placement across a long tail of sites it did not have to court individually, with AddThis acting as the distribution channel.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms are pushed toward the same embeddable-button arms race — Twitter's own bookmarklet-based sharing push later in 2010 shows the pattern — because presence in aggregator toolboxes like AddThis determines which network gets the default share slot.
- Aggregators like AddThis accumulate richer cross-site engagement data of their own, strengthening the clickstream-data position they were flagged for back in 2007 and giving them leverage over which social platforms win publisher real estate.
Third-order effects
- If one-line integration becomes the norm, the open web's social layer consolidates around a few platform-controlled buttons, making Facebook's data footprint extend far beyond facebook.com — the structural condition behind the analyst's claim that regulating it post-data-opening is effectively moot.
- Sharing-widget makers risk becoming dependent gatekeepers: their reach makes them valuable to Facebook and Twitter, but the platforms' ability to ship native buttons could eventually squeeze the middleman out.
The trend: Social expression is consolidating into a handful of platform-owned embeddable buttons distributed through aggregator widgets, extending Facebook's data reach across the open web one line of code at a time.