Coding Strategist

Social bookmarking services like ShareThis, AddThis and AddtoAny help your users share with social services like Facebook, Twitter, email, Digg, etc. They offer their services for free and are very easy setup. They offer features like: personalisation, optimized javascript, customizable, universal, localization, updates and analytics. ShareThis, AddThis and AddtonAny all provide a client side (JavaScript) solution. Even though all three say they are working hard on performance, they all seem to slow your pages down. Of these three ShareThis is the worst  for page speed. Even the fasteest of these 3 services will add 0.131 seconds to the the time it takes for your page to load. That is why everyone who has the time and budget, should build a sharing tool which they host on their own server. See the list below for the full ‘speed report’ generated by HttpWatch for these 3 and a few other social bookmarking services. AddThis is not only the fastest to load,  Google Trends also clearly shows that AddThis is the most popular sharing tool at this moment.

• addthis.com

  Elapsed time: 0.131 seconds
  Downloaded data: 2346 bytes
  Uploaded data: 4532 bytes

  

• socialtwist.com (TellaFriend)

  Elapsed time: 0.243 seconds
  Downloaded data: 14550
  bytes Uploaded data: 2347 bytes

  

• addtoany.com

  Elapsed time: 0.322 seconds
  Downloaded data: 2970 bytes
  Uploaded data: 4939 bytes

  

• sharethis.com

  Elapsed time: 0.509 seconds
  Downloaded data: 3710 bytes
  Uploaded data: 8348 bytes

• openlike.org

  Elapsed time: 0.548 seconds
  Downloaded data: 4413 bytes
  Uploaded data: 5446 bytes
  

• sociafluid.com

  Elapsed time: 1.061 seconds
  Downloaded data: 6822 bytes
  Uploaded data: 16205 bytes

• sociallist.org

  Elapsed time: 1.086 seconds
  Downloaded data: 5669 bytes
  Uploaded data: 12552 bytes

• sharepost.com

  Elapsed time: 1.466 seconds
  Downloaded data: 45435 bytes
  Uploaded data: 2210 bytes

  

If you have the time and/or budget to implement a social bookmarking app on your own server, you should definitely do that. Frank Koehl explains why it is better not to use hosted bookmarking tools if you are able to implement a sharing tool on your own server.  For people using WordPress a  free and easy option would be sexybookmarks.net or any of the other bookmark  plugins @wordpress.com. If you are building your own social bookmarking tool openshareicons.com and enthropia.com/labs/share/ will probably come in handy.

Update: Will Meyer pointed out to me that the loading speed of AddThis can be optimized in this tweet where he links to the Optimizing AddThis Load Time page on  addthis.com