clearspring - the widget network.

The release on May 13th brought some updates to our analytics. Here’s a run down of the new things that you’ll find:

If things feel a little more zippy, it’s because we’ve been rewriting a lot of the code for our analytics platform. It should be even faster for you.

We added a report “Placements Created.” It compliments the Viral Hubs report. That tells you were the widgets were grabbed. This tells you to which domains your widgets were placed.

To hopefully make things a little easier to understand, we’ve tweaked some terminology, like on the Viral Hubs report we now use the metric name “Grabs” instead of “Placements created” and “Source Domains” instead of “Domains.”

The Clicks, Clickthroughs, and Custom events reports are no longer in beta. These reports are really cool! In addition to the Interactions report, they let you know what’s going on inside of the widget and how visitors are interacting with your content. You can measure how many times certain things have been clicked on or interacted with in some way.

If you haven’t utilized these yet, I’d HIGHLY recommend it. You get the interactions and clicks data out of the box, just for using Launchpad. If you want to see clickthrough or custom event data, you need to implement the Tracking API into your widget. The API allows you to apply key value pairs to specific events so that you can categorize them and get pretty granular in your widget analytics.

Last but not least, on the Summary Report and Quick Stats pane, it’s now using the “Placements Created” metric instead of the metric “Active Placements.”

This is all for now on the May 13th release but as you know we’re constantly tweaking and adding new features to the Launchpad family of products and our analytics & reporting tools.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, or concerns about how we could be doing things differently to make your life easier and more successful, don’t hesitate to drop me a line via a comment on a blog post or through an e-mail at justin@clearspring.com. I love hearing from our users.

Just about once a quarter our engineering team will have a Hackathon. They stay up all night and code projects and ideas they haven’t had time to do or weren’t high priority.

Most of the product team (that I’m on) aren’t master coders like our engineers so… our Jedi master and VP of Product Joel Pulliam, not wanting the engineering team to have all the fun, decided to institute a Product-a-thon.

The Product-a-thon would be the same type of marathon session, where the product team would hunker down and work on documenting and spec’ing out all the projects that we hadn’t had time to write up and plan thus far.

Now let’s be honest… the name Product-a-thon isn’t as sexy a name as Hackathon. After probably drinking one too many Vitamin Waters (which he loves), Joel came up with the name Smackathon and it just stuck.

So at 12pm EST today, the Smackthon commenced. Because I think some of us enjoy sleep more than the engineers the official Smackathon hours are only from noon to midnight (while some will probably stay all night).

In between working on my project, I’ll be here to make sure any excitements are documented and reported back to you my loving community.

The release on May 13th brought some updates to Launchpad On-Page. Here’s a run down of the new things that you’ll find:

We streamlined the Launchpad On-Page “Create” screen. It now looks similar to our other widget creation pages. We’ve also brought more of the customization options to that first screen.

We made the code that’s generated much more easy to use. The text “[YOUR CONTENT GOES HERE]” marks where you stick the content you want widgetized.

In the console list view, a Launchpad On-Page widget now has Edit, Publish, and Analyze tabs just like Launchpad Standard.

From the “Edit” Screen, you can add/edit the About Information, alter or redo the widget screenshots, and change the verboseness of the analytics.

From the “Publish”, you can alter the menu/get the code for the menu, find/alter the widget home page, or publish the widget as a Facebook Application.

We also rewrote a good chunk of the Launchpad On-Page back-end code to make it more efficient and speed for you and your users.

There is one more post in this series and it will be on our updates to Clearspring Analytics.

As always, if you have any questions about this update or anything for that matter, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. You can e-mail me at justin@clearspring.com or post a comment on any of these blog posts.

The release on May 13th brought quite a few updates to Launchpad Advanced. Here’s a run down:

At the widget creation screen in our console, you can now specify the template of the content that gets shared.

When we generate the Launchpad Advanced widget code for you to copy and paste, it will now compile out of the box. The code now will display the Share Menu when the widget loads. From here you can easily tweak the code as needed.

In the console list view, a Launchpad Advanced widget now has Edit, Publish, and Analyze tabs just like Launchpad Standard.

From the “Edit” screen, you can change the content template, find and alter the library code, add or edit your parameters, add or edit your about information, alter or redo your widget screenshots, and change the verboseness of your analytics reports.

From the “Publish” screen, you can share your existing Facebook Applications, tap into the Catalog API making you widget available to widget galleries, publish to popular widget galleries, find or alter your widget home page, or get access to API information.

Next week, a few of us are going to be on the road going to some really cool conferences.

I’ll be attending the Tech Cocktail Conference in Chicago, IL on May 29th. It’s being hosted and organized by our friend Frank Gruber and his comrade Eric Olson. They’re the duo that has held the Tech Cocktail mixer events all over the country.

The conference has a packed lineup. Speakers include Web luminaries such as Dick Costolo of FeedBurner, Jason Fried of 37signals, Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV and many others.

I’d love to meetup with as many folks as possible. If you’re coming to the event, drop me a line - justin@clearspring.com.

Secondly, two of our engineers Roger Studner and Austin Fath (also company co-founder) will be attending the Google I/O conference in San Francisco on May 28-29th.

The conference is a great opportunity for developers to talk about how they can push the boundaries of Web applications and use Google’s different Web technologies. There will be sessions on things like “AJAX & JavaScript, APIs & Tools, Social, Maps & Geo, and Mobile.”

If you’ll be at the event and wanna meet up with Roger or Austin, just leave a comment in this blog post and i’ll make sure it gets to them.

On Tuesday May 13th, a group of our engineers braved the VERY early morning (4 AM) to come into the office and push a new release of the Launchpad platform. Over the next few days I’ll be putting out a series of blog posts that detail what we updated.

Here’s a list of some of the more general updates:

Posting widgets to Piczo and Freewebs no longer require a user to enter a user name and password because they’re now based on URL Exchange.

Users can now post widgets to their MySpace Band Pages from our share menu. We did this through our own MySpace API.

Before, users could only have Clearspring widgets be “posted items” on a Facebook profile or turn the widget into a Facebook Application. Well now you can specify an application built on the Facebook platform and have that installed when your users shares a Clearspring widget into Facebook.

We’ve added a new page which describes how you can increase your search engine optimization (SEO) using our widget platform.

Stay tuned for more updates…

Well, we’re all pretty excited for the conference Widget Web Expo. The leading experts from the widget industry will come together on June 16th to the 17th in New York City to discuss all issues within the industry, everything from a creative to technical.

Our very own CEO Hooman Radfar will be giving the opening keynote on the 16th. He’ll be covering how widgets can be utilized to have your content and marketing campaigns reach entirely new users or better engage your existing ones.

Secondly, our Director of Product Management for Analytics Jodi McDermott (aka WidgetGirl) will be speaking on widget analytics on the 17th.

If you’re going to be at the conference and see Hooman or Jodi, make sure you grab them and say hello. We’re all fun friendly people and love to meet new folks.

Also… if you wanna follow Jodi as she goes and presents at conferences, friend her on Twitter.

Launchpad On-Page is our standalone viral sharing menu that allows you to quickly and easily convert any piece of Web content into a widget. It’s very popular and is quickly spreading all over the Web.

One of the biggest questions we get is “how do you customize the standalone menu?”

Well, our Director of Product Management for Launchpad John Schillaci has released another guide which will help you find your way, “Customizing the Launchpad On-Page Menu.”

The guide walks you through everything from how to change the menu sizing, adding a share button, customizing the share button, assigning single services to single buttons, just using our bookmark services, customizing the menu’s appearance, and much more.

If there is anything that we can do to make your Clearspring experience better (like create new docs, improve the existing ones, or anything), don’t hesitate to drop me a line. E-mail me at justin@clearspring. I can pass feedback on to John or anyone appropriate party within the company.

This is really cool. Morgan Stanley recently released their report on the Internet Trends of 2008 and “Widget-ization+ Component-ization” is the #3 trend. We’re glad to see Mary Meeker and company agreeing with us that tiny widgets are such a big deal!