Tynt says that people copy and paste content and links 50 times as often as they click on sharing buttons to post to networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now the company is opening up a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow publishers to track automatically what particular words readers on their site are interested in. That data has incredible potential, but it's not clear it will be used in ways that befit the opportunity it presents.

Why Tynt Makes Me Sad

For many people, Tynt's insertion of links back are so annoying they consider the company a hostile parasite. There are problems beyond that, though.
Services like this, and I say that broadly because I've not seen anything else quite like Tynt, tend to focus on website publishers because they believe that's who will pay for this kind of information. Apparently some publishers don't really know what kinds of content their readers like - but if they found out, they'd publish more like it.

That's understandable from a business perspective, but it's also a little sad. Ought publishers not publish the best content their editorial team is capable of and interested in, according to their editorial brand's unique voice? There's something about publishing on such scale that the interests of your readers isn't obvious, and then making editorial decisions based on sheer numbers, that seems sad to me. Call me a small fry in the publishing business, I guess.

Meanwhile, the data that Tynt offers seems like it ought to be of interest to far more people than just publishers. What about application developers and others who would like to use this data to rank content from other sources? If copy and paste is really 50 times more common than sharing on Twitter and Facebook, then I would think that data would be invaluable for ranking content from third parties.

We've written about sharing services ShareThis and AddThis, both of which already have large sums of money invested in the content sharing data as a platform. Tynt seems likely to have far more data, and data more representative of mainstream email users instead of just social network sharers.

What will become of all this data, though? Will it just be used to steer editorial decisions in a way that panders to what people already know they want? Or editorial that leads, through discovery of things we don't know about yet. Will it be used to target advertisements? That may not be bad - but it's not very exciting either.

What if we get a look into the Web's collective consciousness and all we see is advertising opportunities? Services like Tynt seem like they inhabit a strange place - between an area of great generative potential and a dark and unpleasant place. (Maybe that's just the name, I don't know.)

What would you like to see done with data about what millions of people are copying and pasting? It's time we had that conversation, before this opportunity not just for one company, but for the Web in general, is lost.

Privacy-first advocates may raise concerns about tracking like this, but for publishers interested in learning more about their audiences and the people who help distribute their content, the information could prove quite valuable. Unfortunately, the interests exposed right now are fairly general (music, education) and available only through a dashboard view to publishers. If that data were to be made available programmatically, through an Application Programming Interface (API), then some really interesting recommendations and other services could be built on top of it.

Will the company now start to focus on an API? " In future releases, we will not only show more granular interests, but also make the information available in different ways like APIs, widgets, etc.," Radfar told us today.

Marketers Will Eat Everything

We wrote about AddThis competitor ShareThis in February, 2009 and asked that company how it planned to relate to its data.

I asked [CEO Tim] Schigel whether ShareThis would be sharing this kind of data it collects, in aggregate, with marketers. "That's ultimately where we go with the business model," he said. The company is talking with selected marketers about sharing access to market insights now, but Schigel emphasized that a few conditions needed to be respected. "We need to make sure that publishers can build trust with their readers," he said, "and we need something unique that marketers can't get elsewhere."

ShareThis has offered an API for some time, but that API appears to be write-only, allowing outside developers to change the way their websites share information on the platform.

Can We Move Beyond Marketing?

Hopefully the startup ecosystem will figure out how to monetize on the fascinating opportunities presented by all this data - in a way that genuinely adds value to the lives of end users too (those of us who produced the data). Some of those uses will no doubt be in marketing, and that's great, but hopefully many will go beyond that most obvious use-case for the data. That's not something we can take for granted will occur - even data driven innovation is made of people.

For now, the data market is moving forward slowly but surely. Want to see what's visible via AddThis today? Check out the video below.

If you think that's crazy - you're wrong. ShareThis is a great example of the kind of company that could become a key foundation for innovation in the next era of the web. If it doesn't sell out to advertisers too quickly or too completely. The company released a new version of its widget today and I took the opportunity to talk to CEO Tim Schigel about where the company is headed in the future.

Little changes can mean tens of millions of click-throughs won or lost for a company like ShareThis. The new widget seems like a real improvement. I especially like the one-click buttons to share items with frequent contacts - I use a similar feature on the StumbleUpon toolbar to email things to my wife sometimes, because it's so much faster than email.

Context

Ok, it's a sharing widget with a fat bankroll. What does it really mean though?

Here's how I see it. If the current iteration of the web is based on everyday people creating and distributing content, many people believe that the next iteration will be based on the use of machine learning to build new layers of value on top of that content. What's hot, with what audiences and what kinds of data parsing magic can we work with that information? Few companies are as well positioned to do interesting things with that kind of data as ShareThis. The company says its service is now live on more than 80,000 sites, from scores of small blogs to some very big brands on the web, like ESPN.com, FoxNews, AccessHollywood and Boston.com.

The company has a lot of opportunity for data-centric innovation and CEO Tim Schigel says that's the direction he's looking to take things. You have to hope that companies like this can pull it off and turn into the platforms they say the want to be - and not just advertising platforms, either.

Schigel says that he's watching OpenID closely and that he was pushing Facebook for something like Connect before the service existed. He also told us that there would "soon" be a way for users to easily export their history of shared items, especially now that ShareThis is putting a new emphasis on bookmarking for later retrieval and not just sharing items. I hope that's all true, but when there are tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the table I never hold our breath about such high minded statements being anything more than PR.

In the meantime, though, it's fascinating to think about what ShareThis is going to do with a big pile of user data and a big pile of money.

The Business Plan For Data

ShareThis gets to see a whole lot of interesting things about the ways we share content online. In August the company published a report about the most common tools people use for sharing. The big takeaway? Email still totally dominates online sharing, even through the ShareThis widget. The second most popular method of sharing was for people to publish content into their Facebook news streams. That data told content producers everywhere that if they want to help readers share their content with larger numbers of people, it's important to make email and Facebook as easy to access as possible.

Beyond different methods of sharing, though, ShareThis has obviously got a lot of data about what kind of content is being shared. I asked Schigel whether ShareThis would be sharing this kind of data it collects, in aggregate, with marketers. "That's ultimately where we go with the business model," he said. The company is talking with selected marketers about sharing access to market insights now, but Schigel emphasized that a few conditions needed to be respected. "We need to make sure that publishers can build trust with their readers," he said, "and we need something unique that marketers can't get elsewhere."

What does ShareThis have that Facebook, for example, doesn't have? Schigel says his company can offer platform independence and a much lower price point. By doing nothing but facilitating sharing, ShareThis simply doesn't have the kind of overhead that Facebook requires to run its entire social networking site.

Obviously ShareThis, even with the success its had in spreading its service so far, is going to need to be in a whole lot more places. Part of that increased reach, the company hopes, will come from its developer platform.

ShareThis for Developers

ShareThis already has a developer Application Programming Interface (API) but Schigel says there will be multiple APIs made available soon. The current offering already allows developers to rewrite attributes, like the title, of shared content objects. Hopefully future APIs will give maximum freedom to developers to do things with shared content data that can't even be imagined yet.

Both marketers and developers will soon be getting access to much more sophisticated data streams than mere bulk popularity. Schigel says that ShareThis is filling its Mountain View office with data wonks and PhDs who are aimed at taking ShareThis data beyond the most immediately obvious opportunities, like content recommendation. The company's Principal Scientist, Huitao Luo has worked as a data scientist at LinkedIn, Yahoo! and at the innovative HP Labs. At HP Lou published on research in algorithms developed for cascading classification systems. Recently hired research architect Gordon Rios came from Inktomi/Yahoo, innovative white label calendaring company ZVents and a list of other companies. Rios has a background in data classification, determination of content's international relevance and spam detection.

These are heavy hitters who should offer up some really innovative APIs for the developer community to process user "attention data" and for marketers to monitor trends in interesting and granular ways.

Hopefully it won't all be done in crass service to the interests of advertisers alone. In order to build that trust that Schigel says he wants with publishers and with developers, ShareThis is going to have to offer some of the network effects its capturing to its non-advertiser partners - not just a handy little widget for distribution. That's not unique enough.

Could ShareThis end up turning its little widget into a big company? I wouldn't bet against it. Will Schigel and his crew of scientists also take advantage of the opportunity to facilitate value creation by a larger web of data-centric content and development innovators, thus growing the total pie that the ad market wants a piece of? We can only hope.

How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind.

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how popular sharing by email is. It's clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one however, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The big surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely popular ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively short time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal's blog, which is always a great place to discover new things about the web.

Why This is Important

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It's an important detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most popular can help make this decision. Here at RWW we don't use ShareThis, we use another service called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn't offer sharing by Facebook at all - something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, however, include the following:

• Your site's audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that there aren't a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb stories on MySpace - but maybe we're wrong!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren't for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Delicious users, for example, don't necessarily think of what they are doing as sharing (it's often bookmarking for personal use) and that service has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very popular ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.