Clearspring - Your Content. Everywhere.

(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

(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:

(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.

(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.

(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…

On August 10, a class action law suit was filed against Clearspring and others alleging violations of privacy statutes involving the use of Adobe Flash local storage.  We have made an initial review of the lawsuit and found it to be factually inaccurate with respect to the Company’s technologies and practices.  Most importantly, Clearspring does not and never did collect, store, or sell Personally Identifiable Information (PII)*.

The Company used Adobe Flash local storage in a manner consistent with other leading Flash analytics providers to deliver standard web analytics to publishers.  Reports included aggregate statistics — unique users, views, widget installs, interaction time, and other audience metrics.  The Adobe Flash local storage objects we set cannot access and do not contain PII.

AddThis, our sharing platform, does not use Adobe Flash.  AddThis is an HTML-centric platform.

The company continues to work hard to protect the privacy of web users, including the following:

• We enable users to opt-out
• We do not collect PII*
• We participate with IAB committees to set interest-based ad standards which we plan to support
• We continuously work with publishers to make sure our practices are consistent with their highest standards

We plan to vigorously defend ourselves against these claims, and look forward to telling our side of the story in the appropriate forum.

—

Clearspring has always focused on creating technologies that connect publishers and advertisers to users of the social web. We reach over one billion users monthly via AddThis, the largest sharing platform in the world.

With AddThis, we have built not only a tremendous reach, but also a highly scalable real-time data processing engine. This engine processes terabytes of data daily, and can be leveraged to expose a broad range of real-time insights about how people engage with and share content online.

As we’ve worked with advertisers to deliver performance-based social media campaigns, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in the display advertising business. Agencies have moved towards leveraging advertising exchanges to purchase inventory.

The key to success for media buyers in this new environment is the ability to find the right audience in real-time. Publishers have also experienced this “audience revolution” and have asked for additional insight into their user base. These changes have positioned Clearspring to leverage our reach and processing power to deliver something special – the Clearspring Audience Platform.

For Advertisers, this new platform enables them to reach 200MM US users monthly via top demand-side platforms. We create and deliver custom audiences from the largest influence and intent-based segments, improving the performance of display and video ad campaigns in real time.

For Publishers, our new Audience Platform will soon enable them to understand user interests based on sharing activity across the Web. This valuable insight will allow them to create better experiences for their sites and command higher CPMs from advertisers.

Thank you to all of our partners for helping us get here. Let us know what you think. There’s a lot more to do, but now that this capability is out – we can have some real fun.

We take security matters extremely seriously here at Clearspring. I wanted to provide a more detailed followup to Saturday morning’s “bin.clearspring.com malware” issue that affected latent users of our deprecated Launchpad Widget Platform for a few hours. Note: This issue did not affect current AddThis installations.

What Happened on Saturday, and Why

We, like most of you, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to serve static files as quickly as possible to clients around the world. We actually have several domains set up on CDNs, the one we’re talking about now is used to serve bin.clearspring.com. The assets at this hostname are related to our deprecated Launchpad Widget Platform, as well as some other legacy Clearspring offerings.

From time to time, we allow our CDN provider to create an account with access to our assets to help us debug or otherwise analyze the production system. One such account, which was used for production support some time ago and not deleted as it should have been, was compromised on July 20th, outside of our facility and network, and used to upload a redirecting index.html file (among a few others). This meant that a request to the root of the host would result in a redirect to a spam/malware site. Given that users do not directly visit this URL under normal circumstances (http://bin.clearspring.com is usually a 404), it had no actual immediate negative consequence. That changed in the middle of the night on July 31st (early Saturday AM Eastern time), when Google’s malware classification system located it and, because of a request to http://bin.clearspring.com/ that redirected to this malware site, classified bin.clearspring.com as a malware site. This became visible to users, even those not visiting bin.clearspring.com directly, because the Chrome browser actually blocks sites that include loads of other malware-classified sites. Sites that included legacy Launchpad widgets, therefore, would have been blocked in Chrome.

We began getting user reports early Saturday morning, and quickly identified and removed the offending assets and the access that had been used to place them there. This removed the immediate problem, but left Google Chrome users in the same state as it takes some time for Google to reclassify. We initiated the Google re-review process, essentially requesting Google to recheck the site and declassify it as malware (upon finding no more). This process took a few hours, and by Saturday afternoon the issue was resolved both in terms of the existence of the bad files, as well as in terms of the malware classification and resultant Google Chrome block.

What We’re Doing to Prevent This

We’ve taken and are taking several additional measures to prevent a similar occurrence in the future. We’ve revised our access control policy for our core CDN to disallow access from external locations entirely, are resetting all existing access controls, and are putting in place an additional layer of access monitoring on our CDN provider accounts. We’ve also extended our operational monitoring system to verify the integrity of our CDN roots, not just the assets we actually serve to our products, from an end user perspective. Finally, as it relates to malware classifications specifically, we’ve also claimed all CDN properties (not just our own public web properties) with Google to ensure we have a better view of its own crawling analysis on an ongoing basis.

What Products did this Affect?

This issue affected legacy Launchpad, Widget Promotion Channel, and Widget Ad Network offerings. It did not affect any standard-install AddThis installation. It may have affected AddThis installations for publishers that have cached the AddThis code on their own domains and not updated it since March (our caching policy indicates that publishers will update every 24 hours).

Concluding

This was the result of a security breach of our CDN. We apologize for the problems the event caused for you or your visitors on Saturday morning. We believe we acted as quickly as possible to resolve the issue, and have taken the correct preventative steps moving forward. Thanks for your support, and don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions at all about how this was handled or what we’re doing about it moving forward.