clearspring - the widget network.

The blog search engine and advertising network Technorati has recently released part 1 of their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, which analyzes the health and trends of using blogging as a medium.

This year Technorati reports some awesome stats. They’ve had 133 million blog records indexed. They’ve seen 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days. They conclude that “blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. ”

At Clearspring, we believe that this validates our view that blogs are still a major of avenue for which people share content online. Within the blogging space, all in all we’ve integrated Launchpad with WordPress.com, Windows Live Spaces, MySpace blogs, Xanga, Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal and Vox.

I’ve been blogging for 4+ years now on a variety of domains. I’ve shared with my audience my view points, life experiences, and the interesting things I’ve found online. It’s been an incredible opportunity to meet and form community with so many amazing people that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet with otherwise.

Do you blog? If so, what do you like to share?

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.

Sites like MySpace prevent linking out from within a widget. In response to this, Clearspring has created a workaround to pop up dialog boxes and allow users to easily copy links.

For a while, we only had this available for Flash widgets in Action Script 2(AS2). Now we have a package that you can download and incorporate into your widget that works with Action Script 3 (AS3).

If you have any questions or if there are any other things like this that we can do to make your lives easier, e-mail me - justin@clearspring.com

One of my favorite parts of being Developer Community Manager at Clearspring is getting to talk with all of you who use or are interested in using our services. One thing I want do with this blog is use it as a place that I can answer common questions that come up when I talk with you guys.

So one question that I get a lot is, “I see that it says Launchpad is free but is it really free free?”

I’m very happy to say that yes, it is FREE to use Launchpad. All you have to do is create an account in our system and you have access to our ever popular distribution and sharing tools as well as our first-in-class analytics and reporting services.

We do have some premium Launchpad services, if you’re interested in learning more about those or our WidgetMedia services, please fill out the appropriate boxes on our Contact Page and someone will be in touch with you.

As always, keep those questions coming, we’re here to help. You can reach me via e-mail at - justin@clearspring.com.  Also… follow Clearspring on Twitter. We’re @Clearspring.

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

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.

The release on May 13th brought quite a few updates to Launchpad Advanced. Here’s a run down:

At the widget creation screen in our console, you can now specify the template of the content that gets shared.

When we generate the Launchpad Advanced widget code for you to copy and paste, it will now compile out of the box. The code now will display the Share Menu when the widget loads. From here you can easily tweak the code as needed.

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

From the “Edit” screen, you can change the content template, find and alter the library code, add or edit your parameters, add or edit your about information, alter or redo your widget screenshots, and change the verboseness of your analytics reports.

From the “Publish” screen, you can share your existing Facebook Applications, tap into the Catalog API making you widget available to widget galleries, publish to popular widget galleries, find or alter your widget home page, or get access to API information.

On Tuesday May 13th, a group of our engineers braved the VERY early morning (4 AM) to come into the office and push a new release of the Launchpad platform. Over the next few days I’ll be putting out a series of blog posts that detail what we updated.

Here’s a list of some of the more general updates:

Posting widgets to Piczo and Freewebs no longer require a user to enter a user name and password because they’re now based on URL Exchange.

Users can now post widgets to their MySpace Band Pages from our share menu. We did this through our own MySpace API.

Before, users could only have Clearspring widgets be “posted items” on a Facebook profile or turn the widget into a Facebook Application. Well now you can specify an application built on the Facebook platform and have that installed when your users shares a Clearspring widget into Facebook.

We’ve added a new page which describes how you can increase your search engine optimization (SEO) using our widget platform.

Stay tuned for more updates…