clearspring - the widget network.

It was a year ago today that I joined Clearspring as Community Manager.

As I look back over the last twelve months, I’m just truly blown away by all that were able to do and accomplish. I give total credit to the incredible team that I get to work with on a daily basis and to our CEO Hooman Radfar for creating and sustaining a culture where the team is dedicated to making an impact on the world we live in.

Here are some highlights from the past 12 months:

I got to meet and get to know many of you during my travels around the country. There were cities like Miami, Austin, New York City, Rochester, San Francisco, and Seattle.

We had some pretty exciting product announcements, like the Launchpad In-Widget APIs, integration with the MySpace Apps Gallery, Bebo Application Promotion, WordPress.com integration, launching a brand new version of our sharing menu, address book integration, and testing widget recommendations.

Some pretty cool widgets launched including those about and for U2 3D, the Oscars, ESRB’s Video Game Rating Search, The Spirit, The Daily Telegraph, RCRD LBL, SnagFilms, Blogs.com, SNL, ABC, John McCain & Barack Obama, the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted, Governor Schwarzenegger, and many more.

As a company, we achieved some pretty big milestones, like the launch of the redesign of our web site, receiving ABCi accreditation for analytics, winning “Hottest Buzz”, the acquisition of AddThis, a partnership with MTV, passing 300 million unique visitors per month, and winning Blogger’s Choice in Mashable’s Open Web Awards.

I’m really excited to see what happens over the next 12 months. I’m confident that together we’re going to be able to do some pretty amazing things.

Developing our widget distribution platform Launchpad really has been a conversation between us and you. You all tell us what your priorities are and then we try and work those into the product roadmap.

One thing that you’ve told us over and over again is that you want Launchpad to be as customizable as possible. Well, we’ve just done a visual update for the Launchpad menu to help with this.

In its previous state, we had a high level of customizability but after a point it started to degrade the user experience. So… we maintained the same level of flexibility but decided to simplify things slightly. The destinations are now displayed in more of a list. We’ve changed the font. Now everything’s done in panes that overlay each other.

We’ve also moved away from the tabs. For example, the tabs for “Popular” and “All” destinations have been removed. The choice of all destinations is now just another option in in the destination list. (See the screenshot above)

In this release, you may also notice that we updated and sped up the Address Book integration. It should pull down e-mail addresses faster. We’ve also added support for more languages.

Let us know what you think about this release. Drop me a comment on this post or drop me an e-mail: justin@clearspring.com

Thanks!

Hey guys! Our engineers got into the office really really early yesterday morning so that they could push an update to our widget distribution platform, Launchpad.

Thanks to the feedback we continue to get from you guys about how we can make Launchpad better, we’re able to continue to make changes to improve the platform.

Well, Facebook has recently updated their application creation process. In this release, we updated our Facebook Application Wizard to match this new process and hopefully make it even easier for you to convert your Clearspring widget into a Facebook app.

Can you do me a favor? Can you take 5 minutes, convert a widget to a Facebook app, and then drop me an e-mail? You can reach me at justin@clearspring.com.

At the start of every quarter, throughout the company, we review the goals we had set for ourselves around ways that we can make our products and services even better than before. Well, we had set the goal for Q4 2008 that we’d have 99.9% uptime for serving up our widget analytics reports.

I’m very happy to announce that we’ve met that goal. For Q4 2008, we had 99.932% uptime. Special congrats to our Clearspring analytics engineers Cyrus and Oren. If you find either of them, they like high fives and hugs.

We’re committed to giving you the best possible experience using our system, like 99.9% uptime for our analytics & reporting. If there is anything we can do to make our processes and products even better, drop me an e-mail – justin@clearspring.com

2008 was an exceptional year for Clearspring. Although it was a year marked with progress, these achievements were bittersweet.

We increased revenues by orders of magnitude, secured financing from world-class investors NEA, and have built and acquired two industry-leading platforms in the widget and sharing spaces, respectively, that reach over 400MM unique users globally. We have over 200 leading media companies and agencies as partners, and over 300K users leveraging our platforms.

Like many companies, however, we had to make adjustments in response to the economic uncertainty. In the fourth quarter of 2008, we reduced our workforce to focus on key growth markets and concentrate development efforts around core products and services. We are confident that this move positions us with ample runway to grow our business in 2009. We will continue to deliver our superior level of customer service and lead the industry as we pioneer widget monetization and sharing technologies.

We are sad to have parted with our friends. We couldn’t have done it without you, and it goes without saying you will be missed.

Love (actually),

Hooman
CEO, Clearspring