Blogging is about active sharing. I’ve known this on an intellectual level for years, but working for Xconomy has made the idea very real to me. My stories reach far more readers if I take a few extra minutes every day to share the items with my e-mail contacts and Twitter followers, and to submit links to places like Slashdot and Y Combinator’s Hacker News. And after all, if nobody is aware that you posted something, what was the point of writing it?
Of course, it’s not just my own stories and other Xconomy articles that I share. I find loads of cool stuff across the Web every day, and Twitter is a great vehicle for sharing the joy with people who share my tastes.
This week I started using a browser plugin called Shareaholic that makes all of this active sharing much easier, by providing a single button that connects me instantly to more than 60 sharing services including social bookmarking, blogging, publishing, and other tools. Shareaholic isn’t new—in fact, it’s the most widely distributed browser plugin for sharing, with over a million downloads so far. It’s been trendy among the digerati at least since February 2008, when its inventor, Jay Meattle, was one of three grand prize winners in a Mozilla-sponsored contest designed to highlight the coolest new Firefox extensions. But somewhat embarrassingly, I only learned about it recently, when Meattle gave a presentation at the July Web Innovators Group meeting in Cambridge, MA.
Meattle came by Xconomy’s palatial new offices recently to tell me more about Shareaholic, which has grown from a plugin into a full-fledged startup based in Cambridge. He showed me how easy it is to configure the free tool to submit whatever Web page you’re looking at to Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Techmeme, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and about three dozen other social networking and bookmarking sites and news aggregators. You can also use it to share your discoveries with yourself, by sending them to online notebook services like Posterous or Evernote (my personal favorite) or your blog on LiveJournal, Blogger, or Tumblr.
And, of course, you can e-mail links to yourself or to others via Gmail, Hotmail, or your default e-mail client. In fact, Meattle says the whole idea for Shareaholic came from conversations with a colleague named David Cancel who, like Meattle, was tired of having to copy URLs from the browser address bar and paste them into e-mails when the pair was sharing Web materials with one another. Cancel is the co-founder and CTO of San Francisco- and Cambridge-based Lookery, a targeting service for online ads where Meattle was, until four months ago, the vice president of products. The pair also worked together on the founding team of Compete.com, a Boston-based Web traffic analysis firm sold last year to marketing giant TNS.
For Meattle, it was a simple matter to write some software that would automatically grab a link from the Firefox URL bar and dump it into a new outgoing e-mail message. And over time (meaning, working nights and weekends until a few months ago) Meattle has been able to make Shareaholic work on multiple browsers—Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, Flock, and even Songbird, Mozilla’s open-source answer to iTunes—and communicate with practically every Web 2.0-era sharing service that has a public API, or application programming interface.
But why go to all this trouble to provide a free tool that generates no direct revenue? To answer that, all you have to do is look at Meattle’s recent history as an entrepreneur. At bottom, both Compete.com and Lookery are about collecting and selling data that
