January 28th, 2016

Today we are excited to highlight a few major service additions to the AddToAny sharing platform.

SMS share button

Finally, SMS sharing is ready for action! AddToAny has been rallying the top two mobile operating systems to properly implement the standard SMS scheme for years — Google & Apple finally made it happen. Using the latest versions of Android and iOS (as well as other OSs), AddToAny users can now share links from the web through SMS. In addition to “SMS” sharing, the SMS share button works for sending iMessages on iOS and in other default SMS messengers on Android.

Telegram share button

Welcome, Telegram! Many you have asked AddToAny to include Telegram sharing, and we’re delighted that the Telegram team made link sharing work in all of their apps. With AddToAny, you can now share to Telegram on both mobile and desktop.

Google Classroom share button

Students and teachers, you can now share to Google Classroom with AddToAny.

GitHub follow button

Developers, we’ve included the GitHub icon to conveniently point to your GitHub profile among your other follow buttons.

WeChat and other services

AddToAny is always looking for new services to include by default, and we work to include any service with major usage as soon as it becomes technically possible.

WeChat, for example, is one service that has been on AddToAny’s radar for a very long time, but the developers of WeChat have yet to enable sharing to their apps from the web. Until then, we recommend contacting WeChat to request that feature so WeChat can be included in AddToAny.

Thanks for your requests, and keep them coming!

October 14th, 2015

By November 20, 2015, Twitter plans to remove share counts from both their official Tweet button and share counters across the web.

The product team at Twitter gave us a heads up, and we will gracefully remove Twitter as a supported share counter in AddToAny by early November. While counts for Twitter are going away, Twitter sharing will continue to be prominently supported on the AddToAny platform.

Existing AddToAny share counters for Twitter will simply have the counter alongside the Twitter icon removed. The Twitter share icon will remain intact, just without the counter.

Twitter’s official Tweet button will also have the counter removed, and will “render in the same pixel dimensions as a Tweet button configured without a share count today.” A bit of good news: the Tweet button will have a modern new design next month.

Publishers, developers, and designers use AddToAny share counters because they’re stylish, performant, and accurate as the official counts come directly from each supported service. Twitter, being the second most popular link sharing destination, was a key service to support since Tweets can be a strong social signal for trending content on the web.

On behalf of publishers, we are disappointed to see Twitter discontinue share counts; however, we understand Twitter’s hard decision at this point, and encourage Twitter to reconsider supporting counts at their next opportunity.

If you’re a developer and have feedback or questions for Twitter, you can post your thoughts in Twitter’s developer forum for websites.

January 27th, 2015

Last August we announced a modern new design for AddToAny share menus, and this year begins with an exciting update to that design.

Vector icons

AddToAny has been bullish on highly optimized scalable vector icons, and we have extended the vector treatment to all AddToAny services, including the universal share menu and the universal subscribe menu. (Note: The following are zoomed-in screenshots, so try your nearest AddToAny button to see the real vector menus.) Sixteen square pixels of raster blurriness: be gone! AddToAny SVG icons look great at any scale on any screen, and they are spectacularly crisp on high-PPI devices such as Retina and Retina HD displays. Zoom all the way in if you’d like. Almost magically, AddToAny vector icons are super-lightweight, even faster loading, and gracefully switch to raster equivalents for older browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6-8 and Android < 4.4).

The new icons compliment a new modern font face and an increased font size. AddToAny now uses the best-available and fastest-loading system font starting with Helvetica Neue Light. So with larger icons and larger fonts, that leads us to…

Larger tap areas

Poking around a mobile touch interface can be difficult at times, so we made tappable targets even larger for menu buttons. A larger tap area is a relief on mobile touchscreens, yet still appropriate for desktop pointing devices like mice, trackpads, and the rare pointing stick.

Simpler menus

Multiple share buttons presented an opportunity to actually reduce the number of default options to a helpful degree. Larger icons, larger fonts, and less options improve glanceability, and we fully expect that to result in increased sharing activity.

With AddToAny, you’re always welcome to customize the share menu for your needs. Let us know if you have feedback on this universal menu update.