AddThis.com - Social Bookmarking Made Easy

I was taking a break from coding today and took a quick peek at TechCrunch. TechCrunch had a nice writeup on AddThis, a new widget that I was starting to see on blogs around the web.

The AddThis widget is a way for your readers to bookmark your website on pretty much any social bookmarking service in existence, as well as being able to save it to the browsers local bookmarks. The widget setup page is easy to use and you can quickly generate code for websites, blogs, MySpace page, and even an ezine or newsletter.

The AddThis widget code generator.

Adding an AddThis widget to a website or blog can help to reduce the clutter on a site, so you don’t see a huge list of social bookmarking icons at the bottom of every page. Your readers can easily bookmark the page using the social bookmarking service of their choice. You can gain some insight into what readers save with the statistics that AddThis gathers, and probably the nicest feature, it is free.

There are some possible draw backs to using an AddThis social bookmarking widget on a site. Not that the drawbacks are huge, but they are something to consider. It does add an extra step for people to save your site in the service they want. The widget relies on javascript, so in the off chance that someone has their javascript turned off, the bookmarking does not work. I was able to get the popup window to open but could not bookmark anything. I also occasionally got a request to download a php file when I clicked on a social bookmarking icon instead of it saving the page to the service. Hopefully that is an error they will correct quickly.

Overall the AddThis social bookmarking widget can save some valuable screen real estate on your website while still giving your readers the benefits of saving the pages they like to the service of their choice. I am sure they will work out any errors that they have soon. They also have an RSS version of the widget as well that could be just as useful.