clearspring - the widget network.

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.

Friends, I apologize for getting this blog update out so late. Last week got away from me.

Last Monday, we rolled out an update to Launchpad with a lot of really cool features and I wanted to make sure I told you guys about it. Here’s the rundown…

Facebook Newsfeed Support for App Installation

If your widget is setup to be a Facebook Application, when a user installs it, there will now be an update put into the user’s Newsfeed and live feed. With Facebook becoming more and more orientated around feeds, we think this is a big step in helping people know what their friends are sharing within Facebook.

Hi5 App Generator

Just like we have it setup for Facebook, you can now convert your widgets into Hi5 Applications through our handy dandy App Generator.

Templatable Parameters for Tethered FB Apps

If you’ve setup your widget so that it’s tethered to a Facebook app, you can now pass your data to your tethered app via templatable parameters.

Youmeo Support

We’ve recently added an up and coming social network Youmeo as the newest destination to the Launchpad sharing menu. So… start sharing!

URL Exchange with Xanga

We’ve also recently made it so that sharing into Xanga uses URL Exchange. This means that we’ll no longer be asking for a user name and password for Xanga within our sharing menu. That’ll all be handled by Xanga.

Feedback

Please send us your feedback. We’re all a team here. We depend on your thoughts and feedback to know where we need to be in the future to make you guys as successful as possible. Don’t hesitate to e-mail me – justin@clearspring.com. We love hearing from you guys.

Last June, Clearspring opened up our widget distribution platform Launchpad so that the whole world could make their content shareable. Since then, Clearspring has worked with a community of over 30,000 of the top publishers and developers on the Web. Over that time, we’ve been making plenty of small changes but also listening to the community and thinking about what should be next in Launchpad.

Today, we’re pleased to announce in beta the next generation of Launchpad. Our widget distribution platform Launchpad has become smarter, sexier, and more customizable.

It’s smarter. The menu now automatically prioritizes sharing destinations based on each end user’s history. So… if you like to share content into Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress, then those destinations will be the top items in the menu. We want sharing to be so simple that anyone can do it. With a growing number of destinations for people to share to, we didn’t want users to have to scroll through a large list.

It’s sexier. We wanted to make it so aesthetically pleasing that it was fun to use. We enlisted the help of one of the top user experience design firms in the world to make sure that we got it just right. We’re confident that you’ll like this brand new design.

Lastly, Launchpad is also more customizable. You can change the look and feel of the share menu. It’s liquid. The share menu will change sizes depending on what content it’s integrated with and where it’s installed. You can also prioritize different destinations within the share menu.

At Clearspring, we’re focused on giving you the publisher the best tools for making your content shareable all over the Web. With AddThis and the new Launchpad, we have two best in class products, which we think can take the distribution of your content to an entirely new level.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com. You can also follow me and Clearspring on Twitter.

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

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: