clearspring - the widget network.

2007 is almost over, but here at Clearspring the fun never stops!

Today we released the Clearspring Desktop Support Pack. This is the next step in our “write once, run everywhere” goal for widget distribution. With this new offering, your favorite web widgets can now be downloaded directly to the desktop. Specifically, they can be added to Mac OSX, Microsoft Vista, and other desktops with Yahoo! Widgets 4.5. Wanna try one out? Check out the Cloverfield widget featured on our homepage. Just use the viral sharing menu to place it on your favorite desktop, or social network. As an aside, this campaign is absolutely wicked cool – they are using our tracking APIs to have a contest that awards a prize to the person that can get the most people to grab the widget from their site.

Anyhoo, for those of you that have already created a Clearspring Widget, you will be happy to know that your existing widgets are now auto-magically desktop compatible. For those of you that want to create a cross-platform widget for the first time, no extra downloads, libraries, or development skills are required. Feel free to use your favorite tools like Flash AS2, AS3, HTML and JavaScript to create, distribute and track your widget across the Web AND the desktop! (crowd cheers)

We are jazzed that we have this feature in for 2007 and are excited for all the cool stuff we are going to build in the coming year. Happy Holidays!

We are happy to announce our partnership with Pointroll.

Pointroll is the leading rich media vendor in the advertising space. With over 60% of the market, they serve 60B+ impressions/year and have over 1500 publishers in their network. For those of you geeks that are not familiar with them, rich media advertisements are those really flashy advertisements that you can play with.

This partnership is focused around two areas. First, we will be introducing a new product for advertisers – SnaggableAds. SnaggableAds couple Pointroll’s rich media technology with our viral syndication services to enable users to grab widgets through traditional advertising units. For example, imagine you see an ad for the new Rambo movie that expands to show the trailer. With SnaggableAds, users can now grab the trailer and place it on your favorite blog, start page, social network, or desktop. Ad networks are now distribution channels for widgets.

The second area that we are partnering on is a project we call ‘The Widget Ad Network.’ This service is targeted toward widget publishers that are looking to monetize their creations. Specifically, we are collaborating to deliver a new ad format specifically for widgets. We have got some other great partners here on the operations, publisher, and advertising front like Adify, NHL, Fox, Virgin Mobile and Lions Gate.

Thanks to everyone on both teams that worked so hard to make this happen.

At Clearspring, our mission is to make it simple for you to easily create, distribute and track social widgets everywhere.

In that spirit, we are happy to announce support for Yahoo Widgets. Now your favorite web widgets can be auto-magically shared to any Windows Desktop. No new coding, no messy formats, it just works! Any widget you create with Clearspring is now desktop-compatible. This is just the first of our desktop releases – Vista and OSX are around the corner. Special thanks to our friends at Yahoo and Rich L. Great work. Check out some screenshots.

In the spirit of getting your widgets to more places, we also added AS3 support and a ton of new sharing options. In addition to all of the services already available, your widget can now be shared (via our Viral Service Menu or Launchpad) to:

• Tagged
• BlackPlanet
• Multiply
• Hi5
• Piczo

In addition to increasing our support range, we also updated Launchpad to have a liquid layout. You can now programmatically resize it to fit your website. Liquid Layouts + CSS skins = super customization. Check it out!

Launchpad Menu: Standard 400 x 210px version:

Launchpad Menu: 250 x 210px version:

As always, let us know in the forums if you have any questions, and happy widgeting!