clearspring - the widget network.

The good folks over at Clicky are holding a contest for widgets using their APIs. For all of you widget developers out there looking to do something interesting with analytics, go to town by August 12th and you can even get some cash or be included in their product.

Here are the details:

• their API
• the deal with the contest
• a demo of their stuff, if you have no idea what they do

Have fun!

One of the things we’ve beeing talking with folks in the forums and in person about a lot lately is the whole widget configuration framework built into our platform. This is one of the great (we think) things about our system, and I just wanted to point out a few resources that can help you learn more about it. Specifically, we have lots of docs on this stuff, but here are some good FAQ entries that can help you get started if you’re looking for more info on widget configuration.

• How does this whole Parameters thing work?
• Do I need to make a new widget each time I want to change it’s configuration (like for a video player)?

These’ll get you started, and as always, come see us in the forums if you want to chat about it.

Happy Widgeting!

Another quick highlight of a relatively recent widget from the Clearspring team, this one for the American Express Member’s Project. The project is sort of a funding competition amongst all sorts of good and compelling projects, and it’s currently down to the last few finalists. The widget has video, some voting and vote-tracking capabilities, and lots of info. Pretty full-featured.

I admit I miss Amanda Congdon from the good old days of the seminal Rocketboom (though Joanne’s great), so it’s good to see her kicking it with the Member’s Project folks in the videos highlighted in this widget — there’s a sort of vlog that tracks the project, called The Pulse.

In keeping with our periodic highlight of some of the widgets we’ve done with our partners, I wanted to point out Attendio’s cool widget. It falls in the category of pretty full-featured distributed tools (no simple RSS reader here), and it’s hooked up to a great overall service for managing event scheduling, keeping up with your pals and idols, etc.

Happy Widgeting

Some of us had the pleasure of hearing a great presentation last night from the folks at the Sunlight Foundation (at the very well-organized and well-attended RefreshDC event). They and the folks they work with are doing some really interesting stuff — providing web services on top of data about congressional goings on, mapping earmarks, visualizing lobbying contributions, etc.

It all made me think, being a widget-minded type, of all the cool awareness-building things that could be done with this kind of data. Perhaps a few folks are interested enough to use dedicated applications for rooting through this stuff (and there really are some cool ones), but I’d bet a whole lot more people could be brought into the fold if this kind of stuff were available right on blogs, start pages, social network pages, etc. For all you widget creators out there searching for something interesting to do, check out Sunlight and let us know if you do anything cool with it. I am sure the Sunlight folks would love to see lots of new people hitting their APIs as well.

And on this note, here’s a fairly trivial yet oddly captivating example, a widget that lets you keep tabs on Senator Ted Stevens’ [R, AK] voting record.

Another production system update this morning (yippee), here are some highlights on the changes developers might notice:

• An improved widget-creation/registration process, with some more descriptive choices and info on each of the steps, extra help links, and some UI prettying. It should be a little easier to understand what’s going on now, especially for first-time users.
• Better tagging and tag-sorting in the widget console, for those of you with quite a few widgets in your accounts.
• New options for customizing the Widget Home Page, including several different layout options and the ability to customize it with your own CSS.
• Some back-end stuff that won’t be directly visible, but that’ll help with some other new features coming down the pipe.
• As usual, lots of little fixes and tweaks.
• And last but not least, a new FAQ to capture some of the more common questions we’ve been hearing.

Premium-only feature updates will be updated through our normal partner channels.

As always, any questions, comments, problems etc on the updates, let us know in the forums. Happy Widgeting!

In keeping with wanting to occasionally highlight a Clearspring-powered widget out in the wild, here’s an example form everyone’s favorite reality cooking show (!). It’s a Top Chef promotion/news badge, and we like it because even though technically it’s a feed reader, it’s fully integrated with the design of the site and stylistically is a little less Flash-looking than a lot of widgets out there. It’s seeded right off the Top Chef main page on the Bravo site (where it says Chef Blogs, that’s this widget). Full viral sharing is enabled (and trackable by the Top Chef folks with our analytics package).

Wanted to quickly let folks know that I/we will be hanging out and participating in some DC-local events, here are two on my mind at the moment:

• This Thursday, the Refresh DC July Meetup
• On August 10th/11th, the extra-fun DCBarCamp

If you’re local, or nearby, come!

Also, we’re planning a Clearspring meetup for the late summer/early fall as well, to kick off a broader set of meetups. If you’d be interested in coming, let me know here! I’ll guage interest and we’ll go from there.

Long live the nation’s capital.

P.S., the DC Tech Events site is a great way to keep up with local goings-on in our not-the-valley locale.

Just wanted to say thanks to all the new developers that continue to join the Community platform and register their widgets — you sure are keeping us busy! Thanks for all of the feedback as well, it’s been fantastic (the good stuff as well as the bug reports).

We’ve also seen some really cool widgets coming from folks, I’ll start PM’ing some of the creators to see if we can feature them here on the blog.

We’re in the middle of wrapping up a dev cycle on the next update, will keep folks posted on what’s in it when we do the release. As always, let us know how things are going in our forums.

Happy widgeting.

In addition to being something of a mouthful, the WOM World Widget is also one of the more recent widgets from our client services team.  It’s a great way to show some love and get the buzz for the Nokia Nseries devices.  Thought I’d post it since been getting some good feedback from our fellow widget bloggers, and it’s a good example of how even a relatively simple feed-displaying widget can be made really compelling with the right interface (and the right content).

Like all of the widgets that we build for clients, it uses our industrial-strength back-end distribution platform (the same one you can use for free). Come on over and see us.