After the acquisition of Plixi, a photo sharing app acquired by Lockerz earlier this year, the social media and marketing rewards company adds to its portfolio with the acquisition of social sharing platform AddToAny. With this buy, Lockerz can expand its online sharing platform, which serves more than 1 billion photos per month and currently issued nearly 200 million Decalz (akin to badges).

AddToAny allows users to share and bookmark online content with social networks, news aggregators, email services and instant messengers. The said company was one of the first to offer a social sharing and bookmarking widget for website publishers, and now it reaches 500 million unique users per month. Social sharing is an incredible phenomenon, and one that any company is happy to tap.  As facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his law of social sharing, users are publicly shares 4 billion “things” (status updates, images, etc) on Facebook every single day.

Revenue projected of AddToAny for 2012 ranges in the seven figures. Currently, its WordPress plug-in has been downloaded over 1.8 million times and their Drupal module is actively installed on over 14,000 websites. This Lockerz acquisition is considered a major acquisition in recent months, with goals to increase its ad potential through market research pertaining to end-user behavior.

It’s a tactic we’ve seen before.  Once focused on widgets, Clearspring has taken an entirely new approach to social sharing on the web. After acquiring AddThis, the top link-sharing and tracking platform in 2008, Clearspring launched its Audience Platform, enabling brands to deliver interest-based display advertising to users across the web. At the end of 2010, AddThis topped over 1 billion unique monthly users, and is used on over 8 million unique domains. This same year, Clearspring led the creation of OExchange – the first open standard for online content sharing – alongside Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and others.

Clearspring’s AddThis Platform for iOS, Android was launched to make social tracking easier, simplifying the process of tracking shared behavior. They’re big on data, expanding through a new partnership with the BlueKai data exchange for better campaign monitoring and tracking.

“As mobile access increases, publishers have struggled to fully understanding how their content is performing beyond the site. AddThis is the one platform you can leverage to measure and optimize sharing behavior regardless of how or through what device users chose to share the content.” says Hooman Radfar, Clearspring founder and CEO.

On the other hand, Google+ is just a few days old and it has already gathered worldwide attention.  And it’s growing rapidly. But Google’s looking to keep close watch on the social sharing that takes place within its new networked overlay. Starting August, Google will delete all private profiles.  Google+ doesn’t allow using fakes names either; if you created an account under a fake name, it might be suspended.

“If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011,” said Google.

“The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don’t allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.”