This is a blog about Clearspring, it's development and syndication platform, and the user community around it. It is written by some folks who work there.
I’m a huge fan of ABC’s TV show LOST. It always seems to be a topic of water cooler conversation. I find myself going to the Web site often to check for the latest video updates about what’s going to happen with the next season of the show.
Well, ABC has launched a new video player that uses Clearspring’s Launchpad. You can now grab the videos from the different shows and share them into any of the different destinations that we support.
From the screenshots above, you can see how easy it was to share. All you have to do is press the plus (+) button on ABC.com or “Share” on the embedded video and Clearspring’s share menu comes up. I embedded the widget below in this blog post just for you guys.
As we talked about a few weeks ago, when you take great content especially video and make it shareable, you’re putting together a recipe for virality.
We have a really dynamite Clearspring team based in the Los Angeles, California area. They work with West coast publishers to identify opportunities for them to utilize Launchpad, AddThis, and our widget media services.
Recently, the team decided to get out of the office and go to a team member’s house, where they could strategize and plan for the future.
At Clearspring, we like to be agile and move pretty fast. Our projects typically don’t take months or years. They take days or weeks. So, every once and a while it, it’s good to slow down and look to see what’s coming up and figure how we can better optimize for the future.
We’re working hard to make sure that we can serve you best when it comes to creating, distributing, managing, tracking, and monetizing your widgets.
If you have any thoughts, ideas, questions, or concerns, about where we are at now or where we’re going in the future, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. You can e-mail me at justin@clearspring.com
Here at Clearspring, we want to send a hearty congratulations to the folks at the blog Widgets Lab. Last week, they celebrated the 2nd anniversary of starting their blog. For a while now, I’ve been reading the blog pretty religiously, as do a lot of folks here.
The widget landscape is pretty new and ever changing. Widgets Lab has done a great job at providing thoughtful insight into what’s happened. We hope they keep at it so we can continue reading their posts for years to come.
I am happy to announce that Clearspring has acquired AddThis, the number one bookmarking and sharing service on the web. We have been happy to introduce several firsts to the social web - cross-platform viral postng tools, widget analytics, and widget advertising. Now we are happy to announce the beginnings of another first for the social web - Universal Sharing. The combined audience of our tools is 200MM unique users and 300K+ publishers. This equates to 20B views/month. And this audience continues to grow at breakneck speeds month-over-month. Over the last two years, Clearspring has developed a scalable platform enabling publishers to make widgets, or embeddable content, easy for users to share to blogs, start pages, desktops and social networks. AddThis has created a great service to enable those same users to share web pages. Together, we are laying the foundation for something great. Specifically, we are now the only company offering a comprehensive, end-to-end, set of sharing tools for web publishers seeking to syndicate embeddable AND page-level content to different services. Our vision is to create an open sharing platform connecting publishers, advertisers, and developers. This platform will enable a true first on the web - enabling users to leverage any web-based service from within the context of any application, anywhere. As we move towards this vision, Clearspring will continue deliver the best widget distribution and monetization services possible and AddThis will continue it’s run towards the goal of becoming the most ubiquitous sharing tool for publishers. Shortly, however, you will start to see the beginnings of this vision come to life. We welcome our friends from AddThis and are excited for what’s to come. As always, hit me up with questions/comments/suggestions - we would not be here without all your help and support. Thanks! Editor’s Note: This was originally posted on Widgify, the blog of Hooman Radfar our CEO and fearless leader here at Clearspring. If you haven’t subscribed to his blog, I’d highly recommend it. He’s big, friendly, and likes hugs. - Justin Thorp
This year Technorati reports some awesome stats. They’ve had 133 million blog records indexed. They’ve seen 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days. They conclude that “blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. ”
At Clearspring, we believe that this validates our view that blogs are still a major of avenue for which people share content online. Within the blogging space, all in all we’ve integrated Launchpad with WordPress.com, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace blogs, Xanga, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and Vox.
I’ve been blogging for 4+ years now on a variety of domains. I’ve shared with my audience my view points, life experiences, and the interesting things I’ve found online. It’s been an incredible opportunity to meet and form community with so many amazing people that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet with otherwise.
We were recently discussing different tools we could give to the people to help them understand widgets and the value proposition of Clearspring. We decided to write up a quick white paper. It’s entitled “What’s a Widget and Why Is it Important? (PDF)”
I’d encourage you to download it, read it, and send me comments. Let me know what you think. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com.
I quickly went to NBC.com to see if they had posted clips from the show. They had. Let me say this… not often do I laugh out loud at stuff that I see. This almost had me shooting Red Bull out my nose.
Instantly my first thought was, I have to share this with my friends. I know a lot of people that don’t watch Saturday Night Live but would find the clip hilarious. With the Clearspring share menu, I could do this with ease. As you see below, I shared and posted it to my Facebook page.
For a while now, here at Clearspring, we’ve had an amazing relationship with NBC. They distribute a lot of their content through our widget platform Launchpad. This is an amazing example of how when you match rad content with shareability you have a great recipe for virality.
Hooman and I are hitting the road this week. There will be a couple of great opportunities that you can hear us speak.
On September 8th, Hooman will be at the PMA Digital Marketing Summit on a panel entitled “Social Networking, Social Media, Widgets, Podcasting, User-Generated Content… Where do they fit and how do you use them?” The panel is from 11:15 – 12 p.m. The panel will be moderated by Brian Morrissey of Adweek and will include Marshall Sponder, Sr. Social Networks Analyst at Monster.com and Web Analytics Associon as well as Kwasi Asare, Head of New Media at Bad Boy Entertainment.
Stay connected with Hooman while he’s at the PMA Digital Marketing Summit and in NYC by following him on Twitter.
On September 10th, I’ll be at StartUp SF demoing Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad. Its from 6-9pm at 8th Floor Cafe of Orrick, Herrinton & Sutcliffe (@ 405 Howard St in San Francisco). It costs $10 online in advance / $20 at the door.
I’ll be in San Francisco from Tuesday to Friday of next week. If you want to meetup, grab lunch, coffee, or a beer, drop me a line. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com or follow me on Twitter.
I read A LOT of blogs. Often, I’ll come across a post that I want to blog about or that I want to share with a friend.
Recently blogging company Six Apart relaunched Blogs.com as “the place to find the best in blogs.” We worked together with Six Apart to implement Launchpad so that it was as easy as possible for Blogs.com users to share articles with their friends.
Here’s what happens when you share. Under each story that’s listed, there is a little share button. When you click it, our Launchpad On-Page menu comes up. (See the screenshots at the beginning of the blog post.) You’ll see some of the usual options like “post”, “send”, and “bookmark”. What’s neat is, when you click “post” and select a destination (i.e. Facebook, MySpace), it will send that destination an excerpt of the blog post in a widget. See the example below:
Our CEO Hooman Radfar is quite the busy man. He spends a lot of time traversing the country, meeting with customers, and talking at conferences about widgets and all the awesome things we’re doing here at Clearspring. Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with him. Well not anymore…
Hooman has started using Twitter. You can find out what Hooman is doing right now at his screen name @hoomanradfar. Friend him up.
Another great way to keep up with Hooman is through his popular blog Widgify. There he adds his commentary on what’s happening in the Web 2.0 industry as well as brainstorming ideas about the future. With a little bit of Foo magic, he’s launched a redesign. It’s looks quite tasty. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out - http://widgify.com
