Clearspring looks to tie the Web together with AddThis acquisition
By Dave Jeyes
Online widget company Clearspring has announced that it is acquiring universal content sharing tool AddThis as a part of their broader online strategy. Just how does Clearspring plan to help tie together the increasingly fragmented web?
AddThis is a button that online publishers can add to the content to make it easier to share their stories across the web. The AddThis button can help users submit the stories to social news sites like Digg, bookmarking sites such as Delicious and social network sites like Facebook.
It’s still unclear how the AddThis sharing feature fits in with Clearspring widget distribution platform and analytics tools. Both tools are used by many of the major online publishing outlets, but there’s currently no integration between the AddThis and Clearspring widgets.
One potential strategy is to become a central arsenal for publishers to turn to for harnessing distribution across the Web. Clearspring’s existing widget analytics tool already gives it an edge on other widget platforms and AddThis also uses the same strategy. This combination could allow publishers to see whether their widgets are effective and see where else their readers are submitting their content.
Another potential strategy for Clearspring to leverage AddThis would be as a central sharing resource for Internet power-users. Clearspring could create a widget that allows readers to display a list of their recently shared items regardless of whether they shared them on Digg, Facebook or any number of other services.
Some industry insiders also speculate as to whether Clearspring might create a browser button or plugin to make the services more available to readers. This move would closely follow the strategy of one of the acquisition’s closest competitors, ShareThis.
Any way you slice it, the companies have a lot of work to do in integrating the two services together in a way that is meaningful and useful to both users and publishers. The combination’s focus on A-list publishers, widget distribution and analytics could just give them an edge over similar services.
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