clearspring - the widget network.

Here at Clearspring we’ve submitted three panels proposals for next year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. SXSW is one of the premier conferences in the Web 2.0 industry. It’s held in March every year in Austin, TX and brings together all of the enthusiasts and thought leaders in this space.

Panels are a great opportunity for us to help lead the discussion around the issues that we care about… widgets and the social web.

I need your guys’ help. They have a panel picker application where people get to vote on what panels they want to see. This plays a significant role in what panels get chosen.

So… all I ask of you is that you take 5 minutes today, create an account with the panel picker application, and vote for Clearspring’s panels.

Here are the steps.

1. Go here and create an account – http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/
2. Then vote for these panels:
   • How Sharing is Reshaping the Web (Hooman Radfar)
   • True Life: I’m a Successful Widget (Peggy Fry)
   • How I Got Paid For Getting Grabbed (Hooman Radfar)

Voting closes April 29th so please vote soon. Thanks for your help!

For some time now, we’ve had WordPress.com in the Clearspring share menu. When you clicked the icon and went through the process, it would post a link to the widget in a blog post. This isn’t that exciting. You’ve asked to be able to post an entire widget into a WordPress.com blog and we listened.

After months of work with the great team at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com), we’re pleased to announce that when you post an ad-free Clearspring widget to a WordPress.com blog it will now show the entire widget inside of a blog post.

For security reasons, WordPress.com restricts users’ ability to post third-party content into WordPress.com blogs. So… if you want to allow your users to post your widgets, Clearspring is one of the only ways to do it.

Blogs always have and continue to be a large eco-system where user share online content. We’re excited to offer to you our community this deeper integration with WordPress.com and their ever growing community. In their July report, they announced they had 812,287,538 pageviews on their 1,102,039 active hosted WordPress.com blogs.

For you widget developers and publishers, the cool thing is you didn’t have to do a darn thing in order to utilize this new capability. We just turned it on. It’s part of our commitment to you to make sharing simple.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

One thing I hear is, “I just put this widget on my MySpace profile but I can’t figure out how to get it off. Help!” (Of course, the only reason why you’d remove a widget from your MySpace profile is to make room for more Clearspring widgets.)

Well… I figured I’d write a quick tutorial to help you out.

1. Go to – http://myspace.com
2. Login
3. Hover over “Profile” in the navigation bar
4. Click “Edit Profile”
5. Find the box that corresponds to the section of your MySpace profile (ie About Me, Music, Movies, etc.) where the widget resides
6. Delete the code for the widget out of that box. If you don’t see it initially, try scrolling down in the box.
7. Click “Save Changes” at the very top.
8. You’re Done!!!

If this doesn’t work, drop me a line and I’m happy to help – justin@clearspring.com

This week we’ve released an update to Launchpad that has some really cool stuff in it. Here’s a run down:

MySpace & Bebo Application Promotion

Similar to what we’ve allowed with Facebook apps, you can now tether a MySpace or Bebo application to your widget. So… when a user shares their widget into MySpace & Bebo, instead of the widget being installed, the application is installed. This is great for those of you who already have the social applications built and are looking to bridge into new communities with a widget.

Here’s a screenshot of the MySpace Application Promoter:

Here’s a screenshot of the Bebo Application Promoter:

Post to MySpace API Migration

In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about our intention to support the “Post to MySpace API.” Well I’m pleased to announce that we’ve migrated all widgets over to it and it will be the default for all new widgets created on the platform. What’s cool about this is that your users will no longer have to enter their MySpace user name and password into our share menu.

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback on these and any of our features. Feel free to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com. If you want to stay up with the latest feature updates, make sure that you follow Clearspring on Twitter.

This Sunday Clearspring had a picnic for its Virginia office, which was a BLAST and I’ll be posting more about it later.

One of the highlights was when one of our engineering ninjas Charlie Reverte brought out his paraglider and we set it up out in the field. Our CEO Hooman Radfar decided to see whether or not he could take flight by running across the field. Well, you can see the results below…

Sites like MySpace prevent linking out from within a widget. In response to this, Clearspring has created a workaround to pop up dialog boxes and allow users to easily copy links.

For a while, we only had this available for Flash widgets in Action Script 2(AS2). Now we have a package that you can download and incorporate into your widget that works with Action Script 3 (AS3).

If you have any questions or if there are any other things like this that we can do to make your lives easier, e-mail me – justin@clearspring.com

One of my favorite parts of being Developer Community Manager at Clearspring is getting to talk with all of you who use or are interested in using our services. One thing I want do with this blog is use it as a place that I can answer common questions that come up when I talk with you guys.

So one question that I get a lot is, “I see that it says Launchpad is free but is it really free free?”

I’m very happy to say that yes, it is FREE to use Launchpad. All you have to do is create an account in our system and you have access to our ever popular distribution and sharing tools as well as our first-in-class analytics and reporting services.

We do have some premium Launchpad services, if you’re interested in learning more about those or our WidgetMedia services, please fill out the appropriate boxes on our Contact Page and someone will be in touch with you.

As always, keep those questions coming, we’re here to help. You can reach me via e-mail at – justin@clearspring.com.  Also… follow Clearspring on Twitter. We’re @Clearspring.

“All my bags are packed… Im ready to go… Im standin here outside your door… I hate to wake you up to say goodbye” (Leaving on a Jet Plane, John Denver)

The beginning of August is quickly approaching so I’m packing my bags and getting ready to head out on a few more trips.

As Joel and Stewart get back from their tour of the West coast Web companies (in a Mustang), I’ll be headed out to NYC. I’m attending SocialMediaCamp NYC and Mashable’s party SummerMash in the city. Both events are on August 7th, 2008.

These events are part of Mashable’s Summer Tour. I really had a blast at the Seattle leg. I look forward to spending time and getting to know more folks from the New York social media and Web communities.

For my next trip in August, I’ll be at the Wordpress conference WordCamp in San Francisco on the 16th. Blogs always have and will continue to be a major destination for widgets to be shared. I look forward to spending time and better getting to know the needs of the Wordpress user community.

For each of these trips, I’m giving myself a day or two around each of the events. If you wanna meet up and grab a beer, lunch, or dinner, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

Also… make sure that you follow myself and Clearspring on Twitter. When I travel, I tweet a lot about what I’m up to and where I’m at.

No no, despite what it looks like in the photo, my boss and our VP of Products, Joel Pulliam is not racing cars in Mexico. He and our CTO, Stewart Allen are actually in the sunny state of California this week. They’re meeting with various Web industry leaders and Clearspring users.

Their goals are to gather as much feedback as possible about our products and to start discussions around the future of the Social Web. So far, I’ve heard nothing but good things from their trip. Here in the muggy Washington, DC area at Clearspring Central Command, we can’t wait to have them back and get a full debriefing about how things went.

So… if you’re in California and see a greenish looking Ford Mustang flying down the 101 (apparently Stewart has a lead foot), wave hi to them for us.