Somebody wrote me:

    Can we get an ["AddThis"] button, so that people can share and distribute [...] 
    news and content, (such as news, announcements and press releases) with social 
    networking sites -- to get our message out there, distributed far and wide?
    
    http://www.addthis.com/
    
    We should, also, include an [AddThis] button in any and all press
    releases and announcements sent via email and on our lists... they make
    available that option. And our [affiliates] should use an [AddThis] button
    on their websites.

I have an aversion to the "latest web 2.0 corporation" that hopes to replace an already existing standard.

What we have instead is the RSS icon.  You should be able to see the orange RSS icon on there.  That's how you can syndicate the content automatically in websites that support RSS aggregation.  AddThis is slightly different in that it's push-based rather than pull-based (client-server terms, I apologize if you didn't get that, just continue reading), but I'll explain why I have an aversion to it.

All "web 2.0" websites work on this formula:

    1. release an expensive service for free

    2. lose a bunch of your venture money

    3. when you get big for being such a humanitarian, start advertising the heck out of it and raising your fees

    4. profit

    5. watch as your userbase cringes, puts up with it and loses money, or scrambles to replace your service.

    6. at least you're still getting the not so savvy people paying you a web 2.0 tax or being subjected to your ads.

AddThis is no different, as it's backed by at least two venture capital firms and a number of private investors.

They are banking you people like you sending emails like this out to people who aren't aware of their business model.

What we should do is simply setup our own (preferably open source) system that does the same thing AddThis does, but until then, what's so hard about pasting a link into e.g. facebook and letting facebook grab the summary?  Nothing, in fact.  AddThis isn't so useful a widget after all.

In fact, if they weren't a corporation and really wanted to make a useful widget they would have just made some javascript that didn't need to send content to their servers.  They pay people (like me) instead to ensure that they have a way to monetize it in the future by crippling the communication with the social networking sites by routing it through their service (which isn't technically necessary).  Ironically, that one service is their only true recurring cost.  So you pay their recurring costs to be hooked to them if you want to maintain the features you've introduced to your own site.

The first question to ask every corporate website offering the latest cool thing: 1) how do they or will they plan to make money?

The answer to that is often enlightening.