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!!!!

It’s my pleasure to announce that Clearspring has won Blogger’s Choice for Embeddable Widgets in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. We were selected by Mashable’s panel of over 100+ blog partners from around the world.

We want to thank you guys, our community of users, for helping us to get here. Together, we’ve built the leading widget distribution platform.

Before you head off to grab the celebratory latte, we still need your help. Voting for Mashable’s Open Web Awards “People’s Choice” doesn’t close till this Sunday night at 11:59 pm PST. So… please continue to vote for both Clearspring and AddThis.

Here are the voting widgets:

Thanks! Oh… and feel free to drop me a line any time. I always love hearing from our users. - justin@clearspring.com or @thorpus on Twitter.

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:

Note: This was cross posted on the AddThis Blog.

Friends, I have some great news. With your help, we’ve been nominated for three categories of Mashable’s Open Web Awards. Clearspring has been nominated for best in Embeddable Widgets. AddThis has been nominated for best in Blog Plugins and and Social Bookmarking.

All I can say is THANK YOU!. Your nominations & votes mean so much to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you. It’s all of your time, thoughts, and feedback, which have helped to make our tools best-in-class. We’re absolutely a team in this process.

Well, we need your help again. We’re on to Round 1 of voting for the Open Web Awards. Mashable has created these handy dandy widgets to help with the voting process. (See them below) We’ve taken their widgets and wrapped them with our widget platform Launchpad so that you can place them and share them all over the Web.

Until midnight on November 30th, you can vote once for Clearspring and AddThis every 24 hours in the categories we’re in.

Thanks again for all your help with this. Here are the widgets:

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

This is so cool. This popped up yesterday in my Google Reader and I just had to share.

The folks from Springrolled and Wijard have made their own video to describe to folks what Clearspring is and does. The best part is the video is done completely with with pieces of paper and toy gears.  Thanks guys!

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

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