clearspring - the widget network.

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.

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.

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