clearspring - the widget network.

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!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 9:02 am by Will and is filed under clearspring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.