clearspring - the widget network.

Clearspring’s Chairman of the Board of Directors Ted Leonsis has just authored a new book, “The Business of Happiness: 6 Secrets to Extraordinary Success in Life and Work.” The book tells a bit of Ted’s own story and his approach that has gotten him to where he is today. He also talks about how he’s been able to find happiness both in his business and his personal life.

I just ordered my copy. I can’t wait to dive into it. You can pick up yours online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Ted has provided such great guidance to Clearspring, especially with his mentorship to our CEO Hooman Radfar. I’m confident that you’ll find just as equally valuable guidance in Ted’s book.

A really cool part of the project is that the proceeds from Ted’s book will be going to local DC-based charities that help combat homelessness and give educational scholarships within the inner city.

Today, we are happy to announce that AddThis now supports widget, or embeddable-content, sharing in addition to Web page sharing. Clearspring created the first widget-sharing platform, Launchpad. We have taken the best features from Launchpad and are making them available via AddThis. The result is a faster-loading, easier-to-implement platform that can share and track both widgets and Web pages. And best of all, it’s free!

In fall 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, the number one bookmarking and sharing service for Web pages. Our vision was to establish a universal sharing platform for the Web – a single platform empowering online publishers and advertisers to enable their users to share any content (widgets, Web pages, etc.) with anyone, anywhere.

It is so exciting to be taking such a big leap toward that vision. AddThis is our universal sharing platform.

As AddThis now supports widget sharing, today we’re also announcing our plans to deprecate our original Clearspring Launchpad platform in April of 2010.  After that point, the original Launchpad widget-sharing platform will no longer be available and AddThis will be our one sharing platform.  Widgets will continue to run until the beginning of 2011.  All the while, we will continue to improve the ability of AddThis to share embeddable content with more destinations, analytics and other great features.

For long-time Launchpad users, we realize that there are some steps required to transition.  We’re here to help.  We’ve put together comprehensive documentation to help you move from Launchpad to AddThis.  We’ve also setup an area on our forum which will be specially staffed to make sure that you get your questions answered ASAP.

It’s been a tremendous year.  AddThis now reaches over 600MM users across the world, up from just 200MM last year.  We now support over 200 total sharing services and 50 languages, all with the help of our amazing community.

We thank you for your continued support.  We’re excited to see what the next year will bring.

Now, at just about every office in the DC area, you’ll most likely see men and woman wearing suits in every direction that you turn. Well, buried in the heart of McLean, Virginia, just outside of the Beltway with the world’s largest concentration of government contractors, is a stronghold of startup culture. It’s Clearspring’s World Corporate Headquarters.

Most offices in DC will take a break from wearing suits on Fridays and dress a little bit more casual. Well, at Clearspring, we’re pretty casual all the time. We think people do the best work when they’re comfortable being themselves. So… to have a little fun, we have turned the Friday tradition on it’s head and have Formal Fridays. On Fridays, we all wear suits. Well, most do.

Not to get all gooshy but it’s this kind of light hearted yet serious atmosphere that’s created by the amazing people I work with, which helps makes it fun to come into the office everyday.

Yes, Cyrus (smiley guy in the front) is holding a Dalek. Yep, we’re that geeky. Oh, of all the smiling faces in the photo above, take a guess at who the leader of this merry band of suited rebels is. 

Enjoy more photos…

(Note: This is reposted from the AddThis blog.)

It’s that time of year again. One of the biggest conferences in the Web industry, South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, has published their list of proposals for next year’s (2010) conference in their Panel Picker Web application and is asking the world to vote on who they think should be included.

Can you spare 5 minutes, check out our panels, and give them a vote? We’d really appreciate it.

Here’s the list…

• The Arms Race: Delivering Perfect Ad
• Building Your Community Across a World of Communities
• Growing Social: Using Social Platforms to Grow-Fast
• Government, Meet the People (Online)

Thanks so much for your vote.

Are you going to SXSW? If so, drop us a comment. We’d love to meetup with as many folks as possible.

Note: This post was also published on the AddThis blog.

Editors Note:  This was originally posted on the AddThis blog. If you have any questions, e-mail me – justin@clearspring.com.

In September 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, making us the leading distributed sharing platform.  Our vision for the combined entity was simple – provide the web with a simple platform to make it simple to share any content, to anyone, anytime.

The growth that we have experienced since then has been stunning.  When we joined forces, we reached around 200MM unique users.  With your help we have more than doubled that reach.  As of April 2009, comScore Extended Web reports that we now reach over half a billion people – nearly 50% of the entire global web.

As we have rushed to keep pace with our growth, we’ve laid the groundwork to enable the realization of our vision for a truly open content sharing platform.   We started by leveraging the knowledge, functionality, and infrastructure to improve AddThis.   We’ve revamped the Web site, rewrote the AddThis JavaScript client, created in depth documentation and support mechanisms, and applied our world-class analytics infrastructure to improve the AddThis reporting experience.   To date, these changes have been made to improve AddThis as a platform for sharing links.   Today, we are taking the first step towards making AddThis the one-stop-shop for developers wanting to enable sharing beyond links.

Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website.   Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them.   We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.

No cake is complete without the icing.  So responding to popular demand, we added a set of blogging services as sharing destinations that you may remember from Clearspring – Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress.com and Tumblr.  We also added our friends from Plaxo.

As you can see, this is a jam packed update.  We are taking our platform in what we think is a big and exciting direction.   So please keep up the great feedback.  Feel free to let us know what works for you, but also what doesn’t work.   Drop a comment on the blog post, start a thread in our forum, or e-mail me directly – justin@addthis.com.

So… what do our CEO Hooman Radfar, our Board of Directors, and President Obama all have in common? Well, they’re all featured in the May issue of the Washingtonian.

Hooman and each member of Clearspring’s Board of Directors were featured as 100 of the top “Tech Titans” in Washington, DC. Oh, and I, your humble community manager, made the list as well.

I was hoping that we could point you to the link but right now the story is only available in the print edition. We’ve taken these photos as an adequate substitute:

President Obama, in the now infamous cover with a photo of him shirtless, was featured as one of the 26 reasons why people love living in DC.

Every quarter, we take some time as a company to look back at how things went during the last quarter and then talk about our plans for the next one. As usual, the respective Clearspring offices go out on the town after the meeting and have some fun together.

Well, we did it up this year.

Below is photographic evidence of the shenanigans from our various offices. We haven’t gotten the photos from the West Coast office yet. I’ll post them as soon as I get them.

Team NYC

Team Virginia

We had a little bit of fun this afternoon and created “South Park” style characters for ourselves.  Meet the Clearspring West Coast Media Services team.

The Leader

Our Favorite Pregnant One

Account Management Queen

Princess Bunny

Sales Princess

Affiliate Guy

Media Director

Tomorrow, I’ll post some other Clearspring team members.  (Bonus points to whomever can name all people listed above.)

Another often requested feature that we pushed out in this release is the ability to turn off ratings and comments on your widget home page.

Just sign into Clearspring and pick the widget you want to edit. Go to the Publish tab and click on “Widget Home Page Settings.” Select the Enabled/Disabled radio buttons for Comments and/or Ratings.

What do you think of the widget home page? Is there a way we can make it better? E-mail me – justin@clearspring.com.

In today’s release, we put up a feature that a lot  of you have been asking for. You can now manage which sharing services come up as “popular” in the Launchpad menu for your widget.

By default the services listed are a combination of what services a user has used before and the most popularly used services. Changing what’s popular overrides this behavior.

To change them, sign into Clearspring and find the widget that you want to change. Click “Customize Menu” and then go to “Services.” There you’ll be presented with a button that says “Choose Popular Services.” Click on it and you can easily choose which services should show up as popular in the Launchpad menu.

Definitely let us know what you think of this. Comment on this post or e-mail me personally – justin@clearspring.com.