MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire) -  Today, ShareThis, the world's largest sharing network, launched the public beta of the ShareThis Stream, a new way for users to see what friends are sharing and talking about across the Web. This stream is the next evolution of sharing, making it a more social activity by merging top shared content from ShareThis' vast sharing network with social comments from friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social services.

Drawing on the sharing activity from 130,000 publishers' sites, the ShareThis Stream aggregates and surfaces the content people are sharing alongside reactions from their friends. Rather than simply posting an article to a single social network such as Facebook or Twitter, the ShareThis Stream pulls content shared by a user's friends across several different networks and combines it with conversations happening around that content, creating a single place for discovery and discussion.

ShareThis will soon also make the stream available for publishers on their own sites, enabling them to engage users with popular content, surface the conversations taking place across the social Web, and monetize that content through advertising. Embeddable versions of the stream are currently in private beta, as ShareThis works to identify the content settings publishers most want for their real-time stream: social comments, topic-sourced, vertical-sourced, placement on a site, and visual look/feel.

"People share content, interact with friends, and get their information about the world through several disconnected places online, which often leads to fragmented discovery of quality content and limited conversations," said Tim Schigel, CEO, ShareThis. "We live in an era of content overload but sharing has the power to cut through that overload by surfacing the stuff we really care about. The ShareThis Stream takes sharing to the next level; sharers and receivers can now connect around content and conversations in one place, either on our site or, soon, publishers' sites."

The mass production of digital content today is outpacing people's capacity to absorb it, process and learn from it, and this inflation is causing the value of all content to decline. Sharing is the most effective filter to cut through this noise and surface valuable content. When people share, they make digital stuff worth reading, worth reacting to, worth knowing. With more than 400 million monthly unique visitors in its network across more than 130,000 Web sites, ShareThis is the only company able to surface this kind of content for its users and publishers.

Also launching today are several new buttons for publishers, including those with multiple social icons and share counters. To find out more about the ShareThis Stream or sign up go to: http://www.sharethis.com/stream, or http://www.sharethis.com/publishers/stream if you are a publisher.

About ShareThis

ShareThis makes it easy to share ideas and get to the good stuff online. Reaching over 400 million users across 130,000 sites across the Web, ShareThis is changing the economics of online publishing by creating a market of influence across the Web. ShareThis allows users to share content from anywhere to anyone while simultaneously enabling publishers and advertisers to tap the value of sharing. Based in Mountain View, CA, the company is privately held with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Blue Chip Venture Company, DFJ Mercury, Reservoir Partners, Illinois Ventures, Queen City Angels and RPM Ventures.