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A Follow-up on Privacy and Adobe Flash
Posted: Sat, 04 Dec 2010 15:44:13 +0000
Earlier this year, a class action law suit was filed against Clearspring and others alleging violations of privacy statutes involving the use of Adobe Flash local storage. The lawsuit contained a number of factual inaccuracies with respect to the Company’s technologies and practices, most importantly around the collection of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).* As we said in a blog post at the time, Clearspring does not and never did collect, store, or sell PII* and has always respected the need for user privacy in the quickly changing world of the social web.
To avoid protracted and costly defense and to allow us to maintain our focus on helping to connect publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the social web, we have chosen to settle the lawsuit. This puts the issue to rest, and with it, we affirm our commitment to user privacy.
We are very pleased that the settlement funds will be used to support groups that focus on strengthening privacy for all users online, and we hope to work with these groups in that effort.
Since many of the media articles surrounding this lawsuit inaccurately reported that our AddThis sharing platform uses the Adobe Flash technology, we also want to clarify again that AddThis, an HTML-centric platform, does not use Adobe Flash.
The team at Clearspring believes that delivering targeted and relevant advertising enhances user’s internet experience. Through the collection of non-personally identifiable information we help publishers and advertisers to deliver targeted advertising and content. As always, we allow users to opt out of our service and we continually look at ways to increase user control over this information.
We welcome your feedback and help as we work with others in the industry and government to set acceptable, universal privacy standards for all.
*Email addresses are transmitted only when required to share content to some destinations. Email addresses and their content are not collected, stored, or sold.
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Clearspring Featured as Top DC Start-Up
Posted: Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:32:20 +0000
We were super pumped to be featured in today’s “10 DC Start-Ups You Need to Know About” article by The Next Web!
Congratulations to the hardworking Clearspring team, and of course many thanks to our supporters, especially the users of the AddThis platform.
And also a big congratulations to the other companies featured on the list! Being in such good company makes these sorts of milestones that much sweeter.
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Finishing the Transition to AddThis
Posted: Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:59:42 +0000
Today ends the year-long transition from our Launchpad widget sharing platform to the AddThis sharing platform. As of noon today, Launchpad widget placements are no longer being served.
If you haven’t already, please check out the support for widget sharing within AddThis. If you have any questions about how to install AddThis into your Flash or HTML widgets, drop a note on our forum. We’d love to help ya.
Thanks to all of you that used the Launchpad platform. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. And… thanks to all of you that have made the transition to AddThis. We’re always working hard at making AddThis the best solution for all your content sharing and analytics needs.
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Tonight, CEO Hooman Radfar is Speaking at Bootstrap Maryland
Posted: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 16:18:26 +0000
Tonight, Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar will be speaking in Washington, DC at Bootstrap Maryland.
Organized by AwayFind’s CEO Jared Goralnick, Bootstrap Maryland will discuss how in business “our first big idea may not be the right one, and instead talk about how to get to that right idea and right business model.”
The event is tonight at Pillsbury Law (2300 N St NW, Washington DC) at 6pm. Hooman will be joined by LivingSocial’s Aaaron Batalion and Braintrust & Co’s Tawheed Kader. It will be a really great discussion.
Registration is still open. Get your ticket now.
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My First Day at Clearspring!
Posted: Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:20:53 +0000
(Originally posted on AddThis blog.)
Hello! My name is Kori Hill and today is my first day as a Community Manager at Clearspring.
So far everyone has been very welcoming, but of course, a special shout out to Justin Thorp, my community manager mentor! He’s been awesome and I’m highly impressed by how well he’s managed such a big and important job by himself for so long! I only hope to continue on with the excellent example he has set.
I have spent most of my day getting up to speed on the awesome AddThis platform and learning all the various ways we reach out to customers to make sure you are getting the best experience possible! Even though I’ve been using social media tools for years now, every day it still amazes me the power they have and the channels they open for getting in touch with the people who matter.
Speaking of the people who matter, I very much look forward to interacting with all of you — whether it be on the blog, in the forums or some shout outs on Twitter. (follow me: twitter.com/korihill)
Please feel free to ask me any questions you like! I’m always available here – kori@clearspring.com
Cheers!
Kori
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Menéame, Baidu, StumbleUpon, and Facebook See Big Sharing Increases
Posted: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:10:32 +0000
(Originally posted on the AddThis blog.)
With AddThis, we’re always keeping a keen eye on our data to see how people are sharing content online. It is fascinating to see different services rise and fall over time.
Over the last couple of days, we looked at sharing data from the last 3 months and saw a few services that saw significant increases:
- Menéame, the Spanish social news site, saw a 4.6x increase.
- Baidu’s social network saw a 3x increase.
- StumbleUpon saw a 2.6x increase.
- Facebook has seen a 1.2x increase.
The social web landscape is always quickly changing. Services come and go. With AddThis, you have the peace of mind from knowing that we’ve got ya covered. We’re committed to supporting all the best tools so that you’re always getting the most sharing possible. We currently support almost 300 online services.
What are the new hot social networks, online tools, or communities that we should be supporting? Let me know. Drop us a comment or e-mail me. – justin@addthis.com
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New AddThis Menu for Easy iPad, iPhone, and Android Web Sharing
Posted: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:45:37 +0000
(Originally posted on the AddThis blog.)
Today, we’re excited to announce a new version of the AddThis sharing menu for the Apple iPad, iPhone, and Google Android. Now, when you’re surfing the Web on one of these mobile devices and find an article you want to share, you’ll find a menu that’s much easier to use on a touch interface. This feature is automatically available to all of our publishers.
The success of these mobile devices is undeniable. For example, the day the Apple iPad became available most of us at the office were at home waiting for the UPS guy, or at the Apple store waiting in line. Apple has ignited a ton of interest around the touch interface, with which we’re committed to making sharing easy.
With AddThis, we’re committed to make it easy to share, regardless of what you’re using (desktop or mobile). In the near term, we’re going to continue to roll out new features, experiments, and products that help to tackle the problem of making mobile sharing easier.
If you have any thoughts or feedback about mobile sharing and AddThis, definitely drop us a line. – justin@addthis.com
Here’s AddThis for the iPad:
Here’s AddThis for the iPhone:
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Audience Platform for Publishers
Posted: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:33:13 +0000
(Originally posted on the AddThis blog, to our publishers.)
Friends, Happy Friday!
As you probably have seen from our announcements in early August here at Clearspring (parent of AddThis), we recently launched some really cool technology: the Audience Platform. This new platform enables web publishers (you guys) and advertisers to more effectively reach and identify audiences online.
With your support, AddThis now reaches over 1B unique users per month and is growing fast. In order to deliver analytics on how your content has been shared, we’ve created a highly scalable real-time data processing engine. This engine processes terabytes of data daily and can discover a broad range of insights about how people engage with and share content online.
At Clearspring, we have always been focused on creating technologies to connect publishers and advertisers to audiences on the social web. AddThis increases traffic to your site via sharing and enables you to learn more about what content drives that traffic. Now, with Audience Platform, you can learn more about users based on data aggregated from all activity from across the AddThis Platform. Specifically:
- We can group people into buckets like movie-goers, social influencers, and others.
- You’ll be able to know what bucket a given user falls into when they come to your site
- These buckets could be applied to do creating a better user experience
- Examples include delivering more relevant ads, or personalizing their content experience.
Though we are in the early stages, the team is pumped about the potential of this new technology. It will enable a whole new set of possibilities for you. In addition to helping you guys work better with your audiences, it enables advertisers deliver consumers more relevant ads. Don’t worry, no ads are being shown on AddThis publisher tools, or on publisher inventory without permission. We are working with Advertisers to power interest-based ads only on sites that have given us permission. This approach enables us to create advertising opportunities, while maintaining the performance and integrity of the AddThis experience for your users.
We’re starting to roll out the publisher side of the platform with a number of partners. For those of you that are interested in learning more, or in helping us shape this offering, please sign-up. We will continue to roll out the Audience Platform for Publishers more broadly in the coming months.
We hope you’re as excited to keep working with us as we are excited to keep building cool stuff. If you’re not ready to be included in the Audience Platform, no worries – we have a way to opt-out today. Cookie setting can be turned off. Drop us a note (support@addthis.com) and we’ll send you the documentation. As a heads up, opting out means you will turn off menu personalization (needs cookies, sorry), limit your future analytics (cookies, again), and prevent access to the Audience Platform (fill in the blank).
Although making sure consumers get more relevant and less disruptive advertising is a good thing, this aim needs to be balanced with user privacy. Clearspring is committed to protecting user privacy. Here are some the things we are doing on that end:
- AddThis uses standard HTML cookies only
- We do not collect, store, or sell any personally identifiable information (PII)*
- We enable users to opt-out of interest-based ads on Clearspring and AddThis sites
- We plan to support IAB interest-based ad standards
- We applied for NAI membership early this year and await approval
- We continuously work with you to keep improving our approach
For more info about how we use data, check out our shiny new privacy policy. Special thanks to those of you in the community that helped us with this policy. We’d love your feedback about how we can give you the best way to pick and choose how to engage with our different products. We want to hear your thoughts, so we know we’re serving you the best we can. Please drop us an e-mail at – support@addthis.com.
This is an evolving space and things are moving fast. Thanks for continuing to work with us to create the best, easy-to-use, tools to connect you with your audience. As always, hit us up if you have ideas on how we can do better!Thanks, Hooman
*Email addresses are transmitted, but not collected, only when required to share content to some destinations. Email addresses and their content are not collected, stored, or sold.
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Sharing Around the World with AddThis
Posted: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:03:17 +0000
(Originally posted on the AddThis blog.)
With AddThis, we love watching stats about how people share. It’s especially fascinating to see how sharing around the world differs from here in the United States.
This morning, I took a quick look at our AddThis Service Directory and found some interesting nuggets about international sharing…
- Twitter is the most shared to service in China with ~11% and Japan with 16%.
- VKontakte is the most shared to service in Russia with 45%, Ukraine with 35%, and Belarus with 37%.
- Orkut is the most shared to service in Brazil with 20%.
Check out the AddThis Service Directory for all kinds of other insights into how people share around the world.
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AddThis is Now as Big as Mario Lopez, On Twitter
Posted: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:07:57 +0000
(Cross-posted on the AddThis Blog.)
With AddThis, we recently passed a fun milestone. We now have over 110,000 followers for our AddThis Twitter account (@AddThis). We’re about as big on Twitter as Mario Lopez (@mariolopezextra), of Dancing with the Stars and Saved by the Bell fame. *smiles*
When we’re not heads down on new features for AddThis, we love geeking out about social media. Twitter has been a fantastic mechanism for getting the word out to our user base about what’s going on. We also depend on Twitter for helping to identify customer issues and making sure that they are quickly resolved.
Thanks to all of you who are following us. If you’re not following us, I hope that you will. We’re working on some extra special updates for the feed. Stay tuned…
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