AddToAny has a history of supporting and driving open initiatives (like the Open Share Icon), and today we are delighted to announce support for a new specification: “OExchange“.

The OExchange spec defines a common way for sharing services to receive content, and allows third party sharing services like AddToAny to discover new sharing services.

To kick things off, we’ve already implemented OExchange-Discovery for AddToAny’s all-inclusive sharing application. Sharing services, please note, this was really easy to do thanks to the tools available. It took us less than 10 minutes! We’re excited because as more services adopt OExchange-Discovery, the process of including new services in the AddToAny platform will be more efficient.

Cheers to the team at Clearspring for their work on OExchange, and we hope to see it used across many more services on the open web.

Today we’re excited to announce AddToAny’s official support for sharing to Google Buzz!  We just rolled out an update that switches AddToAny’s Google Buzz link from Google Reader (an indirect route to Buzz sharing) to Google Buzz’s official sharing endpoint (as direct as you can get). As with other sharing/bookmarking and RSS feed product launches, we had the pleasure of working with Google’s awesome team on this one, and we’re all thrilled to finally get Google Buzz sharing into the hands of publishers.

Users can grab a Google Buzz bookmarklet and publishers looking for a standalone sharing link can use AddToAny’s Google Buzz button link.  No update is required for publishers using AddToAny’s WordPress sharing plugin or AddToAny’s sharing module for Drupal.  Like all other service updates, this update is completely automatic.

Over the past couple weeks we have been rolling out a new sharing menu API for AddToAny.  Our primary goal was to make AddToAny self-contained while maintaining perfect backwards compatibility with our old API.

What’s new?

Essentially, the new API is just a new syntax for customizing AddToAny, though we have exposed a few new customizations and techniques that you’re welcome to try out.

What’s changed?

Aside from the optional new syntax, most of the changes are under the hood.  Instead of configuring AddToAny using global variables, which in theory could collide with other global variables, you can now configure AddToAny under one self-contained object, a2a_config.  Additionally, the single object method offers a slight speed gain in modern browsers, and occasionally a noticeable difference in older A-Grade browsers on JavaScript-heavy pages.  Speaking of which, AddToAny’s intensive support for all A-Grade browsers (and more) continues with our long held believe that sharing should be quick and easy for as many devices and user-agents as possible, both old and cutting edge.

Transitioning to the new API

While transitioning to the new API is optional at this point, there are some important aspects to note.

• All transitioned properties take the same name as their legacy global counterparts
• Future properties will not have a supported global equivalent
• Be careful with syntax and handling of the a2a_config object
• Definitely check out the thorough examples and documentation, and list of available properties

If you have any questions or run into any problems at all, feel free to get in touch with us directly.  Happy early Valentine’s Day!