clearspring - the widget network.

Here at Clearspring, we want to send a hearty congratulations to the folks at the blog Widgets Lab. Last week, they celebrated the 2nd anniversary of starting their blog. For a while now, I’ve been reading the blog pretty religiously, as do a lot of folks here.

The widget landscape is pretty new and ever changing. Widgets Lab has done a great job at providing thoughtful insight into what’s happened. We hope they keep at it so we can continue reading their posts for years to come.

We were recently discussing different tools we could give to the people to help them understand widgets and the value proposition of Clearspring. We decided to write up a quick white paper. It’s entitled “What’s a Widget and Why Is it Important? (PDF)”

I’d encourage you to download it, read it, and send me comments. Let me know what you think. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com.

When I woke up this morning, it seemed like everyone online and in the morning news shows were talking about the NBC Saturday Night Live skit where Tina Fey plays Governor Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler plays Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I quickly went to NBC.com to see if they had posted clips from the show. They had. Let me say this… not often do I laugh out loud at stuff that I see. This almost had me shooting Red Bull out my nose.

Instantly my first thought was, I have to share this with my friends. I know a lot of people that don’t watch Saturday Night Live but would find the clip hilarious. With the Clearspring share menu, I could do this with ease. As you see below, I shared and posted it to my Facebook page.

For a while now, here at Clearspring, we’ve had an amazing relationship with NBC. They distribute a lot of their content through our widget platform Launchpad. This is an amazing example of how when you match rad content with shareability you have a great recipe for virality.

You too can use the power of Launchpad to make your great content shareable. Sign up for an account right now.

If you have any questions, drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @clearspring.

Our CEO Hooman Radfar is quite the busy man. He spends a lot of time traversing the country, meeting with customers, and talking at conferences about widgets and all the awesome things we’re doing here at Clearspring. Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with him. Well not anymore…

Hooman has started using Twitter. You can find out what Hooman is doing right now at his screen name @hoomanradfar.  Friend him up.

Another great way to keep up with Hooman is through his popular blog Widgify. There he adds his commentary on what’s happening in the Web 2.0 industry as well as brainstorming ideas about the future. With a little bit of Foo magic, he’s launched a redesign. It’s looks quite tasty. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out – http://widgify.com

Here at Clearspring we’ve submitted three panels proposals for next year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. SXSW is one of the premier conferences in the Web 2.0 industry. It’s held in March every year in Austin, TX and brings together all of the enthusiasts and thought leaders in this space.

Panels are a great opportunity for us to help lead the discussion around the issues that we care about… widgets and the social web.

I need your guys’ help. They have a panel picker application where people get to vote on what panels they want to see. This plays a significant role in what panels get chosen.

So… all I ask of you is that you take 5 minutes today, create an account with the panel picker application, and vote for Clearspring’s panels.

Here are the steps.

1. Go here and create an account – http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/
2. Then vote for these panels:
   • How Sharing is Reshaping the Web (Hooman Radfar)
   • True Life: I’m a Successful Widget (Peggy Fry)
   • How I Got Paid For Getting Grabbed (Hooman Radfar)

Voting closes April 29th so please vote soon. Thanks for your help!

One thing I hear is, “I just put this widget on my MySpace profile but I can’t figure out how to get it off. Help!” (Of course, the only reason why you’d remove a widget from your MySpace profile is to make room for more Clearspring widgets.)

Well… I figured I’d write a quick tutorial to help you out.

1. Go to – http://myspace.com
2. Login
3. Hover over “Profile” in the navigation bar
4. Click “Edit Profile”
5. Find the box that corresponds to the section of your MySpace profile (ie About Me, Music, Movies, etc.) where the widget resides
6. Delete the code for the widget out of that box. If you don’t see it initially, try scrolling down in the box.
7. Click “Save Changes” at the very top.
8. You’re Done!!!

If this doesn’t work, drop me a line and I’m happy to help – justin@clearspring.com

This Sunday Clearspring had a picnic for its Virginia office, which was a BLAST and I’ll be posting more about it later.

One of the highlights was when one of our engineering ninjas Charlie Reverte brought out his paraglider and we set it up out in the field. Our CEO Hooman Radfar decided to see whether or not he could take flight by running across the field. Well, you can see the results below…

No no, despite what it looks like in the photo, my boss and our VP of Products, Joel Pulliam is not racing cars in Mexico. He and our CTO, Stewart Allen are actually in the sunny state of California this week. They’re meeting with various Web industry leaders and Clearspring users.

Their goals are to gather as much feedback as possible about our products and to start discussions around the future of the Social Web. So far, I’ve heard nothing but good things from their trip. Here in the muggy Washington, DC area at Clearspring Central Command, we can’t wait to have them back and get a full debriefing about how things went.

So… if you’re in California and see a greenish looking Ford Mustang flying down the 101 (apparently Stewart has a lead foot), wave hi to them for us.

Last Thursday was the Washington DC Twin Tech Party at the U Street club Local 16. Hundreds of local executives, designers, developers, sales people, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts from local companies came to celebrate their common interest in continuing to make the Washington DC metro area a hub of activity for the Web and technology industries.

We had a nice posse of Clearpsring folks there. We all met a ton of great people. Due to the nature of the event, there was a bigger cross section of folks at this then the usual DC tech event. We also handed out A LOT of stickers, which people proudly wore. If you’d like some stickers, see my previous note.

The whole event, was inspired from a blog post written by Zach Goldfarb for the Washington Post. He noticed from two simultaneous events happening on the same day that there were two tech communities in the Washington DC area. My good friend and CEO of iStrategyLabs Peter Corbett took the initiative and decided to throw a joint party that would unite the two communities.

The event got even more exciting when Business Week and best selling author of “Once Your Lucky. Twice Your Good” Sarah Lacy decided to come to Washington DC as part of her user-generated book tour. She came to the event and got the opportunity meet the local tech scene, as well as sell and sign books.

Sarah is someone that’s seen the inside and outside of Silicon Valley. She was able to impart a lot of valuable advice to us about how we can grow the local community for it to become even more of an exciting place to work and grow a business.

Having Central Command here in the Washington DC area is definitely a source of pride for us here at Clearspring. We want to do our best to contribute and support this community. We hope there will be many more parties like this in the future.

Kudos to Peter for putting on such a great event and thanks to Sarah for coming out.

(Photos taken by and used with permission of Kenneth Yeung)

So… what does green tea and our Media Services Team have in common? Well, we have lots of both in the office this week.

At Clearspring, we firmly believe in hydration and caffeination, as well as having plenty of snacks in the office. On a regular basis, we make a run to the local warehouse store and pick up a variety of snacks and drinks, especially green tea. (See the photo above.) A couple of our product managers have a thing for green tea. *cough*

Not having to worry about going to find the closest soda machine, coffee place, or convenience store, whenever I get a craving, makes our work lives infinitely more productive.

This week we had our entire Media Services team from all over the country in at Clearspring Central Command in beautiful McLean, Virginia for their quarterly meeting. In preparation, our game room got converted into a large conference so that we could accommodate all of the team members (and the slip ‘n slide… just kidding).

Led by our Senior Vice President of Media Services Peggy Fry, this is a great opportunity for them to spend time together, strategize, and plan for the upcoming quarter.

Did I mention that these guys like to party together? Our Vice President of Sales Steve Touhill threw a killer barbecue last night for the entire team.

PS – Bonus points if you can identify the photo of your favorite Clearspring blogger.