clearspring - the widget network.

Now, at just about every office in the DC area, you’ll most likely see men and woman wearing suits in every direction that you turn. Well, buried in the heart of McLean, Virginia, just outside of the Beltway with the world’s largest concentration of government contractors, is a stronghold of startup culture. It’s Clearspring’s World Corporate Headquarters.

Most offices in DC will take a break from wearing suits on Fridays and dress a little bit more casual. Well, at Clearspring, we’re pretty casual all the time. We think people do the best work when they’re comfortable being themselves. So… to have a little fun, we have turned the Friday tradition on it’s head and have Formal Fridays. On Fridays, we all wear suits. Well, most do.

Not to get all gooshy but it’s this kind of light hearted yet serious atmosphere that’s created by the amazing people I work with, which helps makes it fun to come into the office everyday.

Yes, Cyrus (smiley guy in the front) is holding a Dalek. Yep, we’re that geeky. Oh, of all the smiling faces in the photo above, take a guess at who the leader of this merry band of suited rebels is. 

Enjoy more photos…

(Note: This is reposted from the AddThis blog.)

Another often requested feature that we pushed out in this release is the ability to turn off ratings and comments on your widget home page.

Just sign into Clearspring and pick the widget you want to edit. Go to the Publish tab and click on “Widget Home Page Settings.” Select the Enabled/Disabled radio buttons for Comments and/or Ratings.

What do you think of the widget home page? Is there a way we can make it better? E-mail me – justin@clearspring.com.

In today’s release, we put up a feature that a lot  of you have been asking for. You can now manage which sharing services come up as “popular” in the Launchpad menu for your widget.

By default the services listed are a combination of what services a user has used before and the most popularly used services. Changing what’s popular overrides this behavior.

To change them, sign into Clearspring and find the widget that you want to change. Click “Customize Menu” and then go to “Services.” There you’ll be presented with a button that says “Choose Popular Services.” Click on it and you can easily choose which services should show up as popular in the Launchpad menu.

Definitely let us know what you think of this. Comment on this post or e-mail me personally – justin@clearspring.com.

We’re constantly looking for ways that we can improve the sharing experience and give you more customizability/control. With this release, we pushed some changes, to Launchpad, that may be small but work toward the greater goal of making it as easy as possible for your users to spread your content to every corner of the Social Web.

For the menu’s sub-pages, the header color is now driven off of what you specified for colors in the menu customization portion of the console. The color is no longer hard coded on our end. (See screenshot above.)

We’re doing the same thing for user input error messages. The color of that text is based off the colors you set for the menu in the console. (See screenshot above.)

Finally, upon successfully sharing a widget, the user is now presented with a close button that if clicked will completely close the Launchpad sharing menu and take you back to the widget, if you’re using Launchpad In-Widget. (See screenshot above). If you’re using Launchpad On-Page, it’ll take you back to the main sharing menu.

Let us know what you think of these updates or if there is anything else we can change for the better. Drop me an e-mail – justin@clearspring.com.

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

There is currently a situation in the State of California where the legislature has yet to pass a comprehensive budget solution for the state. This is causing ramifications for the state’s many public services and has also caused great frustration for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Governor Schwarzenegger needed a way to share his frustration with the rest of the world and also let the world express their frustration. They created a widget that uses Clearspring’s widget distribution & tracking platform, Launchpad.

The widget shows how many days the legislature has gone without passing a budget. It also shows an approximate dollar figure that the State of California has gone in the red.  With Clearspring’s Launchpad, you can easily share it with all of your friends.

Here’s the widget: