New ShareThis Widget On The Way

I know many of you in the Performancing crowd utilize the Sharethis widget on your blog to make it as easy as 1,2,3 to share content across a wide spectrum of sites and services. Starting later this week, you should notice a new sleek design to the widget as well as a slew of new features such as:

No tabs! – The widget will be tab-free. They have merged the Social Web and Post tabs into one section, making the experience more intuitive and manageable for the user.

Smarter Widget – Whenever registered ShareThis users share content to their contacts, they will display the last three addresses used. Reducing time searching for most used contacts encourages users to share more frequently.

ShareBox v2.0 – Users can now save content directly to their ShareBox through a link in the widget.

Contact Manager – ShareThis users will now be able to access and import their contacts from within the widget. This allows your users to gain access to their address books without leaving your site.

According to the recent newsletter that was released, you will not need to make any changes to the existing widget code. Your current customization such as links, colors, order/selection will remain in tact. The new release will be pushed out across all publishers later this week and all data will also remain in tact through the ShareThis Reporting Dashboard. Once the new design is in place and you don’t like it, you’ll be able to use a new ShareThis Widget Configurator to use when the new widget is on your site. Last but not least, if you use offset settings, those will also migrate over to the new widget.