From time to time you find studies that put a handle on the sheer volume and effect that certain social/web applications have had on the marketplace. Understanding adoption rates for new media technologies can really help companies with their strategies for attacking the web. Should we implement this sharing widget, which button is the most fit for our audience? Are people actually using them?

Well, Blekko has released a new tool that allows us to better understand the adoption of specific pieces of code across the web. Since Blekko is a search engine and has an index of the web, they can give us the ability to peek inside some of these otherwise hard to discern statistics, such as “How many people have installed the Facebook Like button vs the Google + button.”

Below are a list of insightful statistics that I pulled out of the reports they have run so far. I have added a little bit of commentary around each since you can’t quite take them for face value, but they certainly are insightful.

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Social Sharing Button Marketshare

• Facebook has changed its sharing widget on multiple occasions so its a bit tricky to interpret the exact number of sites that have installed it. The stat above analyzes just their Facebook “Like” share button.
• Twitter has its own share button but this statistic does not include other 3rd party implementations.
• Manipulation of the Google Plus buttons’ posting ability isn’t available to 3rd party developers as of writing this post so it is a pretty clean source of data.
• Linkedin has a share button as well and should be a pretty clean source of data.

Links to the other Greps used in this graph can be found here and here.

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Video Site Embed Marketshare

• YouTube has had multiple embed codes. This statistic just pulls in their newest version: http://www.youtube.com/embed therefore leading me to believe this statistic in particular is under-reported.
• Vimeo embeds can be interpreted by looking for http://player.vimeo.com/
• MetaCafe embeds can be interpreted by looking for http://www.metacafe.com/fplayer

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Facebook vs. Twitter Authentication

• The Facebook Connect website in English can be interpreted by looking for: http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js
• Twitter authentication can be interpreted by looking for: http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js

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Third Party Social Sharing Widget Marketshare

• ShareThis adoption can be interpreted by looking for: http://w.sharethis.com/
• AddToAny adoption can be interpreted by looking for: http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js
• AddThis adoption can be interpreted by looking for: addthis_widget.js

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Blogging Platform Marketshare

• WordPress adoption can be interpreted by looking for: content="WordPress
• Movable Type adoption can be interpreted by looking for: content="Movable Type
• Blogspot adoption can be interpreted by looking for: content='blogger'

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Facebook Comments vs. Disqus Comments

• The adoption of Facebook comments can be interpreted by looking for: <fb:comments
• The adoption of Disqus comments can be interpreted by looking for: disqus.com/forums and/or disqus.com/embed.js. The statistic above is the combined URI count exhibiting this code.