clearspring - the widget network.

Editors Note:  This was originally posted on the AddThis blog. If you have any questions, e-mail me – justin@clearspring.com.

In September 2008, Clearspring acquired AddThis, making us the leading distributed sharing platform.  Our vision for the combined entity was simple – provide the web with a simple platform to make it simple to share any content, to anyone, anytime.

The growth that we have experienced since then has been stunning.  When we joined forces, we reached around 200MM unique users.  With your help we have more than doubled that reach.  As of April 2009, comScore Extended Web reports that we now reach over half a billion people – nearly 50% of the entire global web.

As we have rushed to keep pace with our growth, we’ve laid the groundwork to enable the realization of our vision for a truly open content sharing platform.   We started by leveraging the knowledge, functionality, and infrastructure to improve AddThis.   We’ve revamped the Web site, rewrote the AddThis JavaScript client, created in depth documentation and support mechanisms, and applied our world-class analytics infrastructure to improve the AddThis reporting experience.   To date, these changes have been made to improve AddThis as a platform for sharing links.   Today, we are taking the first step towards making AddThis the one-stop-shop for developers wanting to enable sharing beyond links.

Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website.   Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them.   We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.

No cake is complete without the icing.  So responding to popular demand, we added a set of blogging services as sharing destinations that you may remember from Clearspring – Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress.com and Tumblr.  We also added our friends from Plaxo.

As you can see, this is a jam packed update.  We are taking our platform in what we think is a big and exciting direction.   So please keep up the great feedback.  Feel free to let us know what works for you, but also what doesn’t work.   Drop a comment on the blog post, start a thread in our forum, or e-mail me directly – justin@addthis.com.

Note: Lately, we’ve been so heads down on making Clearspring and its products as good as they can be that I thought it’d be fastest just throw this press release up on the blog so that I could share this news with you guys. We can’t thank you all enough for using our products and helping us to get where we are. We wouldn’t be able to report this exciting news without all of you. – Justin

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comScore Reports Second Consecutive Month of Sharp Gains in Unique Visitors for Clearspring

Category leadership gap continues to widen with growing popularity of social media

McLean, Va. – Dec. 3, 2008 – Clearspring Technologies, the leading widget and sharing network connecting publishers and advertisers to audiences on the social Web, experienced a greater than 30 percent increase in worldwide usage of its sharing service between September and October. This increase comes on the heels of a 59 percent increase from August to September after Clearspring acquired social bookmarking leader AddThis. The company attributes this most recent increase to a number of factors including organic growth and new partnerships.

According to comScore, Clearspring logged more than 332 million unique visitors worldwide in October, easily outdistancing its nearest competitor by over 150 million visitors. In addition, comScore revealed that the company further extended its lead in the U.S. market in October with over 120 million unique visitors, an increase of 19 percent from September.

“The comScore data points to a much larger trend in social media that is continuously gaining steam,” said Hooman Radfar, chief executive officer and co-founder of Clearspring. “The value of sharing various types of content across the Web combined with the excitement displayed by Internet users to do so is clearly demonstrated by the frictionless growth of widget media.”

As announced in September, Clearspring acquired AddThis, the No. 1 bookmarking and content sharing service on the Internet, helping the company to grow to a size comparable in reach to the fourth largest property on the Web. Clearspring has since delivered on promises to add to and improve the features of AddThis, recently announcing optimization of the sharing button and language support for 17 additional languages, among other improvements. The company anticipates that this will continue to fuel growth of its sharing services.

comScore is a leading source of data and metrics for both the digital world as well as mobile usage that is trusted by brands such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Best Buy and more. Statistics quoted in this release are found in comScore’s October 2008 Worldwide report.

About Clearspring

Clearspring is the leading provider of distribution, management and monetization services for widgets and other distributable Web content. Clearspring’s free sharing services enable publishers and developers to distribute and track viral digital content to the most popular destinations, including social networks, start pages, bookmarking sites, blogs, mobile devices and desktop platforms. The company delivers billions of impressions every month working with the world’s most prominent brands, media companies and Web 2.0 businesses. With the recent acquisition of AddThis, the No. 1 bookmarking and sharing button on the internet, Clearspring has dramatically increased in reach and visibility. The company also provides new monetization opportunities for publishers and developers using the Clearspring platform by allowing them to seamlessly integrate advertising-based services in their distributable Web content. To learn more, visit www.clearspring.com.

Bill Rubacky, Clearspring Technologies, (703) 677-3999, press@clearspring.com

Travis Murdock, A&R Edelman, (650) 762-2807, travis.murdock@ar-edelman.com

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