clearspring - the widget network.

Last June, Clearspring opened up our widget distribution platform Launchpad so that the whole world could make their content shareable. Since then, Clearspring has worked with a community of over 30,000 of the top publishers and developers on the Web. Over that time, we’ve been making plenty of small changes but also listening to the community and thinking about what should be next in Launchpad.

Today, we’re pleased to announce in beta the next generation of Launchpad. Our widget distribution platform Launchpad has become smarter, sexier, and more customizable.

It’s smarter. The menu now automatically prioritizes sharing destinations based on each end user’s history. So… if you like to share content into Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress, then those destinations will be the top items in the menu. We want sharing to be so simple that anyone can do it. With a growing number of destinations for people to share to, we didn’t want users to have to scroll through a large list.

It’s sexier. We wanted to make it so aesthetically pleasing that it was fun to use. We enlisted the help of one of the top user experience design firms in the world to make sure that we got it just right. We’re confident that you’ll like this brand new design.

Lastly, Launchpad is also more customizable. You can change the look and feel of the share menu. It’s liquid. The share menu will change sizes depending on what content it’s integrated with and where it’s installed. You can also prioritize different destinations within the share menu.

At Clearspring, we’re focused on giving you the publisher the best tools for making your content shareable all over the Web. With AddThis and the new Launchpad, we have two best in class products, which we think can take the distribution of your content to an entirely new level.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line - justin@clearspring.com. You can also follow me and Clearspring on Twitter.

If your office is anything like ours, the lunch table and water cooler conversations have been dominated by the election for President of the United States, where we have the Republican Senator from Arizona John McCain running against the Democratic Senator from Illinois Barack Obama.

Throughout the campaign, there has been a lot of talk about what the candidates believe in and what makes them different.

We recently found something that they both have in common. Both John McCain and Barack Obama use Clearspring’s Launchpad as the widget platform to syndicate the widgets for their Presidential campaigns. (The widgets are to the right and below.)

So… make sure that when November 4th rolls around that you get out and vote and in the meantime make lots and lots of Clearspring widgets.

John McCain and Barack Obama, if you’re listening, soon the world will know which one of you will be the next President of the United States. Regardless, we’d love to help you guys make the great content at WhiteHouse.gov shareable to the world using Launchpad and AddThis. Feel free to drop me a line at - justin@clearspring.com

Our friend iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.

This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.

So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.

I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is - justin@clearspring.com

Over the last few years, it’s been a blast to watch the rise of and get to know Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s Director of Operations at Wine Library a New Jersey-based wine shop that decided to go online. As a way to reach new audiences, he decided to start the online video show Wine Library TV, which turned him and the Wine Library into a viral sensations and dominate brands.

In a recent video on his personal site (embedded above), conveys the same belief that we have, that the existence of online communities has amplified the ability for word-of-mouth and sharing to take place between people.

Here at Clearspring, our goal is to make it as easy a possible for that word-of-mouth marketing and sharing to take place on the Web. All of these different online communities and destinations are very fragmented, utilizing different standards, and processes. At Clearspring, we help to bridge the gap.  We make it so that a publisher can make their content shareable to all these places, regardless.

Wanna make your content shareable? Drop me a line. I’d love to chat and figure out how we can help. - justin@clearspring.com

I’m a huge fan of ABC’s TV show LOST. It always seems to be a topic of water cooler conversation. I find myself going to the Web site often to check for the latest video updates about what’s going to happen with the next season of the show.

Well, ABC has launched a new video player that uses Clearspring’s Launchpad. You can now grab the videos from the different shows and share them into any of the different destinations that we support.

From the screenshots above, you can see how easy it was to share. All you have to do is press the plus (+) button on ABC.com or “Share” on the embedded video and Clearspring’s share menu comes up. I embedded the widget below in this blog post just for you guys.

As we talked about a few weeks ago, when you take great content especially video and make it shareable, you’re putting together a recipe for virality.

We have a really dynamite Clearspring team based in the Los Angeles, California area. They work with West coast publishers to identify opportunities for them to utilize Launchpad, AddThis, and our widget media services.

Recently, the team decided to get out of the office and go to a team member’s house, where they could strategize and plan for the future.

At Clearspring, we like to be agile and move pretty fast. Our projects typically don’t take months or years. They take days or weeks. So, every once and a while it, it’s good to slow down and look to see what’s coming up and figure how we can better optimize for the future.

We’re working hard to make sure that we can serve you best when it comes to creating, distributing, managing, tracking, and monetizing your widgets.

If you have any thoughts, ideas, questions, or concerns, about where we are at now or where we’re going in the future, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. You can e-mail me at justin@clearspring.com

Here at Clearspring, we want to send a hearty congratulations to the folks at the blog Widgets Lab. Last week, they celebrated the 2nd anniversary of starting their blog. For a while now, I’ve been reading the blog pretty religiously, as do a lot of folks here.

The widget landscape is pretty new and ever changing. Widgets Lab has done a great job at providing thoughtful insight into what’s happened. We hope they keep at it so we can continue reading their posts for years to come.