clearspring - the widget network.

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.

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!!!!

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

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:

This morning Clearspring Board of Directors Chairman Ted Leonsis was on CNBC. He talked about the current state of the economy and how Washington, DC is becoming a center of economic growth. He later goes on to talk about how in 2009 we’ll see consumers play an increasing role in advertising and how analytics, tracking, and targeting will become an even bigger focus as people look how to smartly use their advertising budgets. Check out the video of Ted.

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:

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.

Over the last few years, it’s been a blast to watch the rise of and get to know Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s Director of Operations at Wine Library a New Jersey-based wine shop that decided to go online. As a way to reach new audiences, he decided to start the online video show Wine Library TV, which turned him and the Wine Library into a viral sensations and dominate brands.

In a recent video on his personal site (embedded above), conveys the same belief that we have, that the existence of online communities has amplified the ability for word-of-mouth and sharing to take place between people.

Here at Clearspring, our goal is to make it as easy a possible for that word-of-mouth marketing and sharing to take place on the Web. All of these different online communities and destinations are very fragmented, utilizing different standards, and processes. At Clearspring, we help to bridge the gap.  We make it so that a publisher can make their content shareable to all these places, regardless.

Wanna make your content shareable? Drop me a line. I’d love to chat and figure out how we can help. – justin@clearspring.com