clearspring - the widget network.

Our friend and founder/editor of Facebook blog AllFacebook.com Nick O’Neill has recently launched a new service where he reports statistics around Facebook application usage through these really rad flash charts.

In and of themselves, these charts as they are on AllFacebook.com are incredibly useful but they could do so much more. If I was a blogger and wanted to write about a specific application, it’d be great to be able to take the chart and embed it in my blog post.

So… Nick came to us here at Clearspring. Together we made his charts shareable with Launchpad. With ease, a blogger can now grab a chart and place it wherever they want. By making his content shareable, Nick is extending his potential reach and increases the chances that new people who aren’t familiar with his content will stumble upon it.

Here’s an example widget:

Note: This was cross posted on the AddThis Blog.

Friends, I have some great news. With your help, we’ve been nominated for three categories of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Clearspring has been nominated for best in Embeddable Widgets. AddThis has been nominated for best in Blog Plugins and and Social Bookmarking.

All I can say is THANK YOU!. Your nominations & votes mean so much to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. It’s all of your time, thoughts, and feedback, which have helped to make our tools best-in-class. We’re absolutely a team in this process.

Well, we need your help again. We’re on to Round 1 of voting for the Open Web Awards. Mashable has created these handy dandy widgets to help with the voting process. (See them below) We’ve taken their widgets and wrapped them with our widget platform Launchpad so that you can place them and share them all over the Web.

Until midnight on November 30th, you can vote once for Clearspring and AddThis every 24 hours in the categories we’re in.

Thanks again for all your help with this. Here are the widgets:

This morning our engineers braved the early morning and frigid East coast temperatures so that they could release an update to Launchpad and AddThis.

Updated Console Design

At Clearspring, in addition to making your widget easy to distribute and track, we want them to be easy to manage. So… today we released a brand new look for our widget console.

Before, the navigation was down the side and we were getting feedback saying that our users wanted more screen real estate to configure our sexy new sharing menu and look at our analytics reports. Now the navigation is across the top, positioned as clickable tabs (see tabs outlined in yellow in the screen shot above).

Also… if you scroll down to the very bottom of the console, we’ve added a really rad small Easter egg. You can change the color theme for the console. You have your choice between blue, black, green, orange, and hot pink. (Thanks Foo!)

Address Book Integration with the Sharing Menu

Often when I’m sharing content, I want to share it to one person in particular instead of Facebook or Twitter as a whole. For a while now, we’ve had e-mail sharing but then you have to remember a person’s e-mail address. That’s a pain. Well with today’s release, we’ve launched integration with your Yahoo Mail or GMail address books. As you can see from the screen shots above, all you have to do is pick your e-mail provider, stick in your e-mail username and password, and it will suck down your contacts. You then decide with whom you want to share each specific widget. It’s super easy.

Something to note… if you have a lot of contacts in your address book, it may take a moment to suck them all down.

AddThis Update

We’ve also done a pretty substantial update to AddThis. Make sure you subscribe to the AddThis blog to stay updated.

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback on these features. E-mail me - justin@clearspring.com

We’ve been pretty busy here at Clearspring. Earlier this month we made an exciting announcement. MTV Networks will be using Clearspring and our widget platform Launchpad to make their content shareable, as well as monetize their content using our widget network.

MTV Networks has a massive portfolio of great content. There’s everything from channels like MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Spike, VH1 and others. When you take great content and make it shareable, you have the recipe for online virality. We’re confident that you’re going to see that over and over again with MTV Networks and Clearspring working together.

It’s been incredibly flattering to have so many great major media companies like MTV Networks, Time Warner, NBC-Universal, Fox Broadcasting, and others, make the decision to use Clearspring’s sharing tools. We’re going to keep trucking forward to give you the best toolset to help distribute, track, manage, and monetize your online content.

This is so cool. This popped up yesterday in my Google Reader and I just had to share.

The folks from Springrolled and Wijard have made their own video to describe to folks what Clearspring is and does. The best part is the video is done completely with with pieces of paper and toy gears.  Thanks guys!

Friends, I apologize for getting this blog update out so late. Last week got away from me.

Last Monday, we rolled out an update to Launchpad with a lot of really cool features and I wanted to make sure I told you guys about it. Here’s the rundown…

Facebook Newsfeed Support for App Installation

If your widget is setup to be a Facebook Application, when a user installs it, there will now be an update put into the user’s Newsfeed and live feed. With Facebook becoming more and more orientated around feeds, we think this is a big step in helping people know what their friends are sharing within Facebook.

Hi5 App Generator

Just like we have it setup for Facebook, you can now convert your widgets into Hi5 Applications through our handy dandy App Generator.

Templatable Parameters for Tethered FB Apps

If you’ve setup your widget so that it’s tethered to a Facebook app, you can now pass your data to your tethered app via templatable parameters.

Youmeo Support

We’ve recently added an up and coming social network Youmeo as the newest destination to the Launchpad sharing menu. So… start sharing!

URL Exchange with Xanga

We’ve also recently made it so that sharing into Xanga uses URL Exchange. This means that we’ll no longer be asking for a user name and password for Xanga within our sharing menu. That’ll all be handled by Xanga.

Feedback

Please send us your feedback. We’re all a team here. We depend on your thoughts and feedback to know where we need to be in the future to make you guys as successful as possible. Don’t hesitate to e-mail me - justin@clearspring.com. We love hearing from you guys.

My Friends,

The 2nd Annual Mashable Open Web Awards (http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/) is now accepting nominations and their selection process is based on nominations and voting generated from the Web at large. So, we’re asking our customers to take a brief moment to fill out the attached Mashable widget form and submit a nomination for Clearspring in the Embeddable Widgets category.

It’s quick and it’s easy. All you need to do is enter an active email address, hit the submit button and then verify your nomination when they send you a confirmation email. Here’s the voting widget, feel free to post it to and share it from your favorite social network. Make sure you click the black “get & share” button.

http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/4918b43816785512

As the Web’s leading widget network, Clearspring helps publishers like you extend your audience on the Web. We are dedicated to making it as easy as possible for end users to share your content. And, best of all, the Clearspring platform is free. So, if you have a moment, please vote to nominate Clearspring before 11:59 PM on November 16, 2008. Thanks!

Best Regards,

Justin Thorp
Clearspring Community Manager

…and I approve this message

PS: Do you use AddThis, the world’s most widely used social bookmarking button on the Web? If so, can you show them some love? Vote for them below: