clearspring - the widget network.

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:

At Clearspring, our mission is to connect publishers and advertisers to the rapidly growing audiences that are spending their time on social networks and other social destinations. Along those lines, we are always experimenting with new features that will help us create new distribution channels.

Recently, we’ve been testing cross-promotion capabilities that help achieve that end and hopefully create a better user experience. Specifically, we have been trying to figure out, if we know that a user likes one widget, can we show them another widget they may be interested in?

This type of recommendation service idea has been implemented in different services across the web. Our friends at WordPress.com do it with “possibly related posts.” YouTube does it with “Related Videos” on the side of the page and in the embedded player. At the end of a SlideShare presentation, you see “Related Slideshows.”

Today, we’re launching an early beta test of a recommended widget feature. Think of it as “If you like this widget, you may also enjoy this one.” This is just another way for us to help get your content into the hands of more people so that it spreads all over the Web.

Because we will be randomly selecting widgets and we have such a huge volume, the chances are that you won’t see this at all. But just in case you do, we wanted you to know what’s up.

As always, if you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns about this or anything else, don’t hesitate to e-mail me - justin@clearspring.com.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!

I’m a big fan of old movies. Seems like every old Western has a shot that pans across the front of the Post Office and you see the WANTED posters flapping around in the wind that had been hung by the town sheriff or local law enforcement. It makes perfect sense. If you want to catch criminals, put up their photo in places where people spend the most time.

Well, today more of the world is spending their time online in online communities and social networks. Noticing this trend, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has made the list of their top 10 most wanted fugitives shareable with Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad.

Now any user can grab the list, get the faces of these criminals in-front of their community, and hopefully help the FBI catch the bad guys a lot faster.

Here’s the widget:

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:

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.

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.

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

The blog search engine and advertising network Technorati has recently released part 1 of their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, which analyzes the health and trends of using blogging as a medium.

This year Technorati reports some awesome stats. They’ve had 133 million blog records indexed. They’ve seen 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days. They conclude that “blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. ”

At Clearspring, we believe that this validates our view that blogs are still a major of avenue for which people share content online. Within the blogging space, all in all we’ve integrated Launchpad with WordPress.com, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace blogs, Xanga, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and Vox.

I’ve been blogging for 4+ years now on a variety of domains. I’ve shared with my audience my view points, life experiences, and the interesting things I’ve found online. It’s been an incredible opportunity to meet and form community with so many amazing people that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet with otherwise.

Do you blog? If so, what do you like to share?