Great to hear the opinions from the developers too.

I’m doing a little research into the major social sharing providers such as: AddThis, ShareThis, AddToAny etc.

There’s no ‘About Us’ on the iBegin site.

Can someone provide details regarding:

01. Who founded iBegin?
02. Key People?
03. Current reach (how many users have installed it?)
04. Sites (how many sites is it on?),
05. Alexa Traffic rank?
06. Plugins / Extension supported?
07. Any examples of iBegin in use in the real world – on big named sites?
08. How often it’s updated
09. Last significant update
10. Future plans…Addtoany, sharethis and addthis have some good added value services e.g. ShareThisStream.

I prefer the iBegin model it’s faster and slicker and the large icons are great. (printer icon could do with being revised) but, I’m concerned that iBegin lacks features and will not be able to compete with aforementioned social sharing providers.

Cheers

That’s what I’ll be doing as soon as I can find the time to implement it as a WordPress plugin. (I don’t like having to remember that I’m using a modified theme and jQuery doesn’t come standard)

Kind regards from Austria,
eliZZZa

Now about the external dependency issue, the important thing to me is to choose my external dependency wisely. For example, unless I’m missing something, this page uses reCaptcha, which is an external dependency, right? I assume it’s being used because there is no free alternative? At my office we’re not allowed to use this reCaptcha tool because of the external dependency problem (so we had to buy a commercial version). However, we are allowed to use AddThis or AddToAny. For us, a security tool like captcha is more important than a sharing tool, so we disallow the external dependency for security-related functions and allow it for non-critical functions like sharing.

For sharing we go for beauty and user experience over all else, and that’s where I think AddToAny really shines.

Thanks again for the great site!

great site

What I initially like about iBegin Share over the others is the ability to convert posts to pdf and word docs, which is an important features to offer our users. We’re a travel blog and letting them make their own travel guides this way is useful in travel planning.

Thanks, Frank, for all this.

My verbage was simply a typo, consequence of a train of thoughts getting smashed together while writing the post. I’ve changed the entry, and thanks for pointing it out.

Pay attention specifically to src=”http://w.sharethis.com/button/sharethis.js[...]“. It’s just a normal URL, like any page you visit. This means that each time the page is loaded, your web server goes off to retrieve a copy of the javascript required to display the button

This isn’t true; it’s the user’s browser that fetches the URL, so there is no impact on your server’s bandwidth. There is an impact on the page load time for the user, and on w.sharethis.com’s bandwidth, but not on your web server.

Ahmed, David, glad to see you both made your way over here. I completely missed the fact that the customizability pretty much requires individual images, so I’m glad you decided to chime in.

Let me take this opportunity to give my heartfelt thanks for the work you’ve done on this product thus far. It’s fantastic. I hope it provides the professional exposure you deserve for the work.

To be fair, I think Pat does an excellent job articulating the strengths of his software, and those arguments are not without some merit. I do genuinely believe that Add to Any could break away from the pack if they started pushing the localized version of their software.

But open source software always provides a unique advantage over any corporate product. All things being equal — which in this case I’d say they are — open source always has the advantage.

David, I’ve installed the update and it works beautifully. Thanks for the fixes!