clearspring - the widget network.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, a little company called Google has proposed a new set of standards in the social networking space. The goal of OpenSocial is to provide a common set of APIs for social applications to leverage user profiles, lists of friends, and activity information without having to code this functionality differently across destinations. So, the same code should theoretically work on any social network that supports the APIs. Cool, right? Needless to say, we’re fully supporting it with our platform.

Here’s a message from our CEO, Hooman Radfar, on the topic:

Clearspring supports OpenSocial and has been at the forefront of this development. We began developing platform extensions while participating at the Google hackathon last month, and are now working closely with long-standing social networking partners such as Hi5 and Friendster as they start to implement their support of OpenSocial. As a result, you will soon be able to take advantage of OpenSocial as a feature set on our world-class widget syndication platform. And, as the OpenSocial standards evolve, we’ll change so you don’t have to.

This is a great step for the Web and for our partners. We are committed to our mission to make it simple for you to create, distribute and track widgets using a single platform. No confusing formats, no need to stay current with changing standards - just one powerful platform to enable you to write once and run anywhere across social networks, start pages, blogs and other personalized media channels. To that end, we’ve spent the last year pioneering new ways to increase your reach. Clearspring created the first one-click viral install process, set the pace for widget analytics and management, and worked with leading social platforms to help them meet increasing market demand for greater openness. With OpenSocial, we now have an additional set of building blocks that will not only enable us to extend your reach, but will also enable you to create higher engagement applications.

Click here to find out more about Clearspring’s OpenSocial plans. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can provide any further information about OpenSocial or our plans to help you capitalize on this exciting new opportunity. We appreciate your support and are excited to continue to keep you on the cutting edge as the Social Web continues to unfold.

Hooman Radfar
CEO

So, stay tuned (sign up for notifications) as we open up the supporting features in the platform. And as social networks get on board with supporting it, we’ll be right there with them, enabling simple publishing and all the other great cross-platform distribution options we know and love.

In the midst of our Launchpad release, we also added some cool new features to the analytics platform. In addition to standardizing the terminology and layout in the UI, the team’s been working the past few months to roll out interaction analytics - specifically, the ability to measure how visitors are interacting with a widget. The newly-available metrics are:

• Clicks - The number of times a widget was clicked.
• Clicked Views - The number of views where a widget was clicked.
• Click Rate - Total clicks divided by total views.
• CPCV (Clicks per clicked view) - Clicks divided by clicked views.
• Avg. Time Spent - The average time spent per view as defined by the time that the page loads till the visitor navigates away from the page that the widget is on or closes their browser.
• Avg. Interaction Time - The average time spent per clicked view as defined by the aggregate amount of time that a user interacted with a widget.

The Details

Clicks is pretty straight forward; its the number of times that a widget was clicked. The clicks that we are including are user initiated clicks on the widget. What we are not including are the clicks after the visitor chooses to share the widget. A visitor can click on the share services menu (which we count) and expend several clicks to share their widget into any one of the social networks or even to just get the embed code.

Clicked Views is a derivative of clicks and views; the number of views where a widget was clicked. This is a great metric to measure if visitors are even drawn to your widget. It assumes that you want a visitor to click on your widget and/or that someone has tried to share your widget.

Click Rate is similar to clicked views, and is displayed as a percentage rate. It gives the analyst a benchmark of the percentage of views where someone clicks on the widget.

If you have a highly interactive widget where visitors can either play a game or interact heavily with your widget, CPCV (clicks per clicked view) will help you measure the engagement level of your widget. If your widget is merely a video or a vehicle for getting visitors back to your website, then clicked views or click rate will provide a more accurate benchmark measurement.

Time Spent is one of the cooler metrics. Measuring how long someone spends viewing your widget is not the easiest metric to tackle. If you think about it, page view duration in standard web analytics is really derived by the difference between the time stamp of two pages that have been viewed. In the case of a widget view, a visitor is not required to refresh the page….so how does one calculate this? We spent a lot of time weighing how “chatty” to make your widget in alerting that it is still alive on the page, with two primary goals:

• Maintain user experience by not reaching out to the server every time a visitor touches the widget.
• Provide the most precise measurement of time spent available amongst the widget provider-sphere.

The end result is a default setting of 30 second pings back to our server that decay incrementally over time if a visitor is not interacting. However, in the event that a visitor interacts with the widget, all clicks, events and an update on the time spent metric is sent within 5 seconds. Through the Analytics Settings tool in the Widget Console, we give you the ability to turn this setting up or down depending on the type of widget that you have (read more about it in the docs).

The Interaction Time metric measures the precise amount of time that a visitor interacted with the widget. So if they moused over the widget for 10 seconds at the beginning of their widget view, and then moused over it again for 25 seconds five minutes later, the total interaction time would be 35 seconds. This metric is reported as an average of interaction time per clicked view.

There’s more stuff than what we’ve talked about here, so go take a look (click Analyze for any of your widgets, even Launchpad widgets, in the console). A big thank you to many of our customers for their input and feedback leading up to the release, the analytics team is psyched for you to be using these metrics to manage and optimize your widget strategy.

Have fun!

We’ve often talked about some of the interesting things that our runtime services can do for your widgets, and up until now much of that has been available to our internal studio team only. We’ve now opened it all up — if you are developing a widget (Flash to start, Javascript version coming soon), you can now use some special APIs to do all kinds of cool stuff in your widget. Stuff like:

• getting information about the current viewer of your widget, like where they are located geographically
• tying into the placement lineage of your widget (where users found it, where it spread to, and more)
• tracking user URL linkouts
• using your own instrumentation to track custom events in our analytics interface

All of this is available to you with the In-Widget Services API, which will be available for your widget if it is registered with the Clearspring platform.

What’s more, you can even get certain information passed right to your server as URL arguments, so even for Flash widgets you can do things server side, like serve different versions of the widget for different geographic locations.

Check out all the details in the documentation, and have fun! If you have any questions at all, let us know in the forums!