“More unique links are shared via Shareaholic than are shared on Digg.com on any given day” – Shareaholic Founder Jay Meattle
More and more sites have begun to embrace share buttons, particularly for Twitter and Facebook, which has made sharing much easier. But, not everyone has added these onto their site yet, meaning sharing isn’t always one-click process.
When I asked Jay Meattle, the creator of Shareaholic, what initially interested him in building a link sharing site like this, he told me, “I created Shareaholic (for Firefox initially) to scratch my own itch. Then, I thought maybe others could benefit from all the work that went in as well, so I decided to release it publicly. Turns out other people had the same itch.”
Shareaholic not only allows you to share from any site, but you can share to over 100 services with one click of their downloadable button tool bar.
Once Shareaholic is installed, All you need to do on any page is click the Shareaholic button in the toolbar, and all the social media sites you have set as your favorites will pop up. Once you have clicked on a sites icon you get sent to the site with a link and a caption for the page like you would from an on-site button.
One thing I was impressed with while testing Shareaholic was the simple caption and bit.ly link provided when sharing. Some sites try to fit too much text into the caption and make it look very formulated, which Shareaholic so far has not done to me once.
Toolbars have a bad reputation for slowing down browsers, but this is not the case with Shareaholic. Once I added it, I realized that when MC Siegler (TechCrunch) said “Shareaholic is fast; does not slow down Chrome at all,” he was completely right.
I have seen no speed decrease in my browser since adding Shareaholic.
Another great feature that the Shareaholic toolbar provides is that it acts as a bookmark system for all of the social sites a user may be sharing to.
Another unique and useful tool Shareaholic has released for Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 is called Buzz Monitor, which pulls statistics from Digg, Delicious, and a few other services. This allows you to see how popular posts and pages are among other users, providing the added value of social proof.
The Shareaholic service has been so well received that it has already had over 1.5 million downloads, including some notable users such as Veronica Belmont (Techzilla host), who said, “As a certified social networking and link-sharing addict, Shareaholic has become my favorite new enabler!”
Shareaholic seems to be a pretty unanimously good idea in the eyes of technophiles and bloggers, and BostInnovation agrees.
In our interview, Meattle added, “Shareholic winning the Grand Prize in Mozilla Foundation’s Extend Firefox contest for the best Firefox add-on further validated the idea.” This is a truly impressive win considering it was judged by Garrett Camp (founder, StumbleUpon), and Brendan Eich (CTO, Mozilla and creator of JavaScript), among others.
Shareaholic was officially founded in August 2009 in Cambridge, Mass. Fortunately for Boston, Meattle explained to me that he “likes the startup vibe here a lot,” adding, “Other than the snow, what is there not to like about Cambridge?” It looks like this is one awesome startup that we can expect to continue to share the local tech scene with.
