clearspring - the widget network.

Back by popular demand, local tech recruiter Robert Neelbauer and company are holding another Social Matchbox DC this evening. It’s an opportunity for Washington DC startups to meet local tech enthusiasts and job seekers. It’s kind of like start-up speed dating.

Our very own recruiter extraordinaire Ian Jones will be there representing Clearspring. We’re currently looking for people to fill numerous positions, like: Web Developer, Data Analytics, Java Engineers, Controller, Billing Analyst, Helpdesk/Desktop Jr. Level, Sr. Operations Engineer, and Yield Manager.

Clearspring will be sponsoring the food for the event this evening.

If you’re coming to the event tonight, make sure that you find Ian and say hello. If you can’t make it to the event, e-mail us at jobs@clearspring.com.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working hard with NBC Universal to upgrade their widgets to work in the new MySpace framework and get posted in their Beta Apps Gallery.

Here are some of their widgets that we’ve launched as MySpace apps. Please add them
to your profile and let us know what you think of the early experience!

• The Office
• Saturday Night Live
• LoveScope

We’ve been working closely with MySpace throughout this process.  Stay tuned to the blog for future announcements, especially once the MySpace Apps Gallery has officially launched.

When I walked into the office yesterday morning, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been in the office for a week. I’ve been traveling and attending conferences so that I can meet and talk with as many of you as possible.

Last week I was in New York City for AJAXWorld. I filled in for our CEO Hooman Radfar at a talk he was going to give on “The Social Aggregator – Widgets Reshape the Social Web.” It went really well. We had the room filled with about 40 people. There was a lot of great discussion about how the Web is getting broken into pieces via widgets and about the current state of consumer-facing and enterprise tools that are bringing the pieces of the Web back together. For a good overview of the talk, check out Sean Michael Kerner’s post at InternetNews.

Unfortunately, I was only at AJAXWorld for the last day of the conference on Thursday. I had a fantastic time meeting people within the AJAX community and listening to some of the sessions. I would have loved to do more.

On Tuesday, I attended the SNAP Summit in San Francisco. It was also a fantastic conference. It focused on “the business and design of social applications.” This is such a fast growing space. It was a blast meeting a lot of the people who are behind the top social applications.

Some of the other highlights from the SNAP Summit was getting to hear from Dave Morin the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook and Jim Benedetto the Vice President of Technology at MySpace. I also had the pleasure of seeing two of my favorite bloggers speak: interface designer Joshua Porter from “Bokardo” and Forrester Analyst Jeremiah Owyang from “Web Strategy by Jeremiah”. Later that night, Jeremiah hosted and helped organize a blogger dinner, which I attended and thoroughly enjoyed.

So… what’s next? Next weekend I’m headed to Rochester, NY for BarCampRochester3, which we’re a sponsor of. As I’ve mentioned in the past, we’re big fans of BarCamps. They’re a great venue for getting folks together to discuss ideas around the Web, technology, and everything.

If you’re in Rochester, please drop me a line. I’d love to meetup. My e-mail address is justin@clearspring.com

Also… if there are any developer events happening in your area in the upcoming months, let me know about them. We’re always looking for new opportunities to get out there and meet with the community.

Our master of all things mobile Rich LaBarca will be speaking at the local user group Mobile Monday DC on Monday, March 17th at TeqCorner. He will give a talk and lead a discussion entitled, “Leprechauns? Demystifying The Mobile Content Value Chain.”

I have been to a few Mobile Monday DC events and they’re great opportunity to meet members of the local mobile industry. So come and join us on St. Patrick’s Day for discussion, good times, and probably pints of green beer later in the evening.

YouTube has recently released a whole slew of new APIs which really moves them from just being an online video destination site to an online video platform. For example, we now have access to customize the YouTube player to make it do new and interesting things.

So… yesterday, our VP of Product Joel Pulliam laid down the challenge to our developers. Steak dinner at Morton’s for the first person who could integrate Launchpad Advanced with the YouTube player user interface.

With the YouTube and Clearspring together, the user has greater power and ease to share the video with family and friends. Videos also have the potential to be seen by a wider audience.

Clay Yount, one of our ninja Flash developers on our studio team, won the challenge. Just click on the asterisk button in the player of the video below and you’ll see the familiar Clearspring share menu. This menu is embeded in the player, so it travels with the player as it’s spread.

Dylan Greene, one of our ninja JavaScript programmers, put together this implementation using Launchpad On-Page. When you press pause or the YouTube button, the share menu is placed on top of the video. This menu stays on the page and doesn’t travel with the player.

PS – Yes, we’re big fans of the video game Portal. smile

MySpace has recently has released the “Post to MySpace” API. We’re very excited about this as it will allow your content to be shared in MySpace even easier.

We’ve been working with MySpace on this API from the outset and plan to support this new feature.  As soon as they finalize their support of the profile location parameter, which tells our system where on a MySpace profile to place the widget, we will begin to support this feature on the Clearspring Platform.

As many of you know, this new API only enables posting up to 1000 characters, even though our current platform enables higher.  After we roll out support, we will continue to maintain our support of posting more than 1000 characters.  Also, we will continue to support posting to comments.

The “Post to MySpace API” is just one area which we have been working with MySpace on.  We continue to work closely with their team as they integrate support of OpenSocial to deliver the best widget platform possible.

Stay tuned for further updates…

Just as I’m getting home from Austin, our CEO Hooman Radfar is going to be hitting the road again. He’s speaking at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit and AJAX World.

The Digital Hollywood Media Summit is in New York City, NY on March 12-13th. Hooman is speaking at a workshop on the 12th entitled “Widgets as a Platform: Content, Commerce, Communications.” He’ll be speaking with folks from RockYou, KickApps, Slide, MuseStorm, and Turner Broadcasting System. Sun Yung of Oppenheimer & Co will moderate.

AJAX World is also in New York City, NY from March 18-20th. Hooman will be giving a talk on “The Social Aggregator – Widgets Reshape the Social Web.”

As always, if you see Hooman or any Clearspring employee at an event or a conference, come up and say hello. We’re quite the friendly bunch. We always love meeting folks who are doing new and interesting things on the Web.

This last week I had a blast in Miami at BarCampMiami and Carsonfied’s Future of Web Apps. It’s obvious that there is a vibrant Web and technology community in Miami as well as Florida in general, which is really exciting.

BarCampMiami hosted more than 300 people. Numerous sessions were given on a variety of topics. Many folks gave demos on the projects or applications they were working on. Some of the memorable demos for me were Aviary, Santiago Siri’s demo of Popego, and Kevin Marks discussions of the Social Graph API. I also spoke on “Widgets: Your Content. Everywhere. (.pdf of slides)” to a packed out a room.

Special kudos to the BarCampMiami organizers: Alex de Carvalho, Brian Breslin, Chris Saylor, and Nick Dominguez. It was a great event and I’m glad Clearspring got the chance to sponsor. I hope to come back next year. If your city is doing a BarCamp, drop me an e-mail. I’d love to hear about it and possibly come out..

Future of Web Apps was also a blast. Seeing speakers like Kathy Sierra from Creating Passionate Users and Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV was a highlight. By far, the best part was all of the different friends I was able to make during the breaks and party after the event, like the FreshBooks guys, Jose Castillo, and many more.

Kudos to Ryan Carson, Mel Kirk and the Carsonified Crew for making Future of Web Apps a great event! I’ll definitely be back

I look forward to meeting more of you a future events around the country, like SXSW.

Well the fun doesn’t stop after BarCampMiami/Future of Web Apps or Graphing Social Patterns. Here at Clearspring we’re continuing to travel to developer conferences around the country to meet with as many of you as possible.

Next up on the docket is Microsoft’s annual MIX conference in Las Vegas from March 5 – 7th.

One of our ninja developers Dylan Greene will be representing Clearspring at MIX. He’s been working on a demo video to unveil at the Show Off competition about how the Clearspring widget platform will support Microsoft Silverlight. If you see Dylan, make sure that you stop him and say hello.

On Friday, I’m also heading out again. I’m off to the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference, in Austin, TX from March 7 – 11th.

I’m really excited about SXSW. It will be my first time. A lot of my friends have gone for the last three or four years and have regaled me with their stories of meeting up with developers from all around the world.

My goal is to meet up with as many people as possible. If you’re going to be at SXSW, drop me an e-mail at justin@clearspring.com.

Our CEO Hooman Radfar is speaking today at 3:30 PM PST at O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns West Conference in San Diego, California.

He’s on the a panel entitled “Widget Strategies & Social Platforms,” which is being led by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research.

If you’re going to the conference, make sure you check out the panel. After it’s over, find Hooman and say hello.