clearspring - the widget network.

I’m a huge fan of ABC’s TV show LOST. It always seems to be a topic of water cooler conversation. I find myself going to the Web site often to check for the latest video updates about what’s going to happen with the next season of the show.

Well, ABC has launched a new video player that uses Clearspring’s Launchpad. You can now grab the videos from the different shows and share them into any of the different destinations that we support.

From the screenshots above, you can see how easy it was to share. All you have to do is press the plus (+) button on ABC.com or “Share” on the embedded video and Clearspring’s share menu comes up. I embedded the widget below in this blog post just for you guys.

As we talked about a few weeks ago, when you take great content especially video and make it shareable, you’re putting together a recipe for virality.

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.

I read A LOT of blogs. Often, I’ll come across a post that I want to blog about or that I want to share with a friend.

Recently blogging company Six Apart relaunched Blogs.com as “the place to find the best in blogs.” We worked together with Six Apart to implement Launchpad so that it was as easy as possible for Blogs.com users to share articles with their friends.

Here’s what happens when you share. Under each story that’s listed, there is a little share button. When you click it, our Launchpad On-Page menu comes up. (See the screenshots at the beginning of the blog post.) You’ll see some of the usual options like “post”, “send”, and “bookmark”. What’s neat is, when you click “post” and select a destination (i.e. Facebook, MySpace), it will send that destination an excerpt of the blog post in a widget. See the example below:

This week we’ve released an update to Launchpad that has some really cool stuff in it. Here’s a run down:

MySpace & Bebo Application Promotion

Similar to what we’ve allowed with Facebook apps, you can now tether a MySpace or Bebo application to your widget. So… when a user shares their widget into MySpace & Bebo, instead of the widget being installed, the application is installed. This is great for those of you who already have the social applications built and are looking to bridge into new communities with a widget.

Here’s a screenshot of the MySpace Application Promoter:

Here’s a screenshot of the Bebo Application Promoter:

Post to MySpace API Migration

In previous blog posts, I’ve talked about our intention to support the “Post to MySpace API.” Well I’m pleased to announce that we’ve migrated all widgets over to it and it will be the default for all new widgets created on the platform. What’s cool about this is that your users will no longer have to enter their MySpace user name and password into our share menu.

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback on these and any of our features. Feel free to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com. If you want to stay up with the latest feature updates, make sure that you follow Clearspring on Twitter.

One of my vivid memories from college is walking into the student union to see fliers everywhere. Groups would try to get your attention with whatever event they wanted you to attend. Some of the most popular fliers were when they showed cool documentary films on campus.

These days students don’t spend as much time in the student union. Time is being spent on social networks like Facebook and MySpace, where users are sharing their lives with their friends and family.

Well Clearspring’s Chairman of the Board Ted Leonsis and Board member Steve Case have seen this trend and recently launched SnagFilms. It’s an online destination for watching documentary films. It gives documentary filmmakers, who probably don’t have the money for major theater distribution, access and distribution to a world audience via the Web.

They’ve launched with a lot great content such as State of the Union, Paper Clips, and Super Size Me.

Viewers can then show support for the movie by taking the corresponding widget and distributing it to all of their friends via social networks and blogs by using our Launchpad platform.

For example, here’s the widget for Super Size Me:

Seems like more and more I’ll go to a Web site and I’ll just want to take a piece of it with me to my start page. Well, the company RCRD LBL has made that easy.

RCRD LBL pronounced “record label” is…

an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists. In addition to our in-house label, the RCRD LBL network includes a curated roster of independent record labels offering free MP3 downloads and multimedia content in blog format.

For a new band, this is a sweet way of getting your music out into the hands of the people that want to listen.

In a recent release of their site, they turned popular components of their Web site into widgets. On the home page, there are Flash widgets with a list of Fans, Tour Dates, and a list of their Most Popular music.

They did an amazing job of implementing Launchpad Advanced. When you click “Grab This”, you get their own customized share menu with the options for where you want the widget to be shared.

Here’s a screenshot of the RCRD LBL Radio Widget:

Have you built something cool with Launchpad Advanced? Share it with us. Post the URL in the comments or e-mail me at – justin@clearspring.com

From the beginning, we’ve known that top-notch analytics are an essential part of having a good widget network. Over the last year, we’ve dedicated a huge amount of time and resources to make sure that our widget analytics and reporting tools are the best in the world… giving you the most detailed and accurate numbers possible.

Now you don’t have to take our word for it. We are pleased today to announce that we’ve become the very first widget network to receive accreditation from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Interactive (ABCi).

For several months, ABCi was granted unfettered access to the processes, systems and people here at Clearspring Central Command in McLean, Virginia. They thoroughly and rigorously reviewed everything to guarantee the numbers were getting reported correctly.

The metrics included in the audit were: views, unique visitors, placements created, active placements, clicks, clickthroughs, events, geographic report, computer information, interacted views, clicked views, average time spent, and average interaction time.

This is something we’ve been working on a for a while and are super proud of. We want to raise the bar for acceptable service for a widget network, which means being held accountable to industry standards and best practices by a third party.

We know this is important to you, especially those of you who buy advertising. According to a survey commissioned by ABCi, “ad buyers indicated they would be even more inclined to advertise in emerging forms of media if audited by an independent third party.”

Despite just opening an office in England, our teams have already been working hard with a number of different European media companies and brands to talk about the value of widgets and Clearspring.

We are all pretty excited that British newspaper The Telegraph has recently launched widgets that implement Launchpad. Now you can get the latest news, football scores, tv, arts headlines, and much more all through the Telegraph’s widgets.

It’s awesome to see an organization, that was founded in 1855 (according to Wikipedia) with their broadsheet newspaper The Daily Telegraph, embrace new and upcoming mediums for communication.

Below are a few of their widgets. Enjoy them and share them.

The release on May 13th brought some updates to Launchpad On-Page. Here’s a run down of the new things that you’ll find:

We streamlined the Launchpad On-Page “Create” screen. It now looks similar to our other widget creation pages. We’ve also brought more of the customization options to that first screen.

We made the code that’s generated much more easy to use. The text “[YOUR CONTENT GOES HERE]” marks where you stick the content you want widgetized.

In the console list view, a Launchpad On-Page widget now has Edit, Publish, and Analyze tabs just like Launchpad Standard.

From the “Edit” Screen, you can add/edit the About Information, alter or redo the widget screenshots, and change the verboseness of the analytics.

From the “Publish”, you can alter the menu/get the code for the menu, find/alter the widget home page, or publish the widget as a Facebook Application.

We also rewrote a good chunk of the Launchpad On-Page back-end code to make it more efficient and speed for you and your users.

There is one more post in this series and it will be on our updates to Clearspring Analytics.

As always, if you have any questions about this update or anything for that matter, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. You can e-mail me at justin@clearspring.com or post a comment on any of these blog posts.