clearspring - the widget network.

Though it's great being able to keep up with the latest on Brangelina (the Clearspring studio team is loyal to Jen, if you're wondering), on this project the team enjoyed some experimentation with the treatment of the "grab it" button. This simple little UI element -- the way your widget allows users to get a copy for themseves -- is one of the most critical parts of any widget design. Without it, and without it being enticing enough to click, the widget is just a stationary thing that a visitor can't carry with them. In this case, a simple periodic "bounce" of the button and a popup bubble on hover really help encourage the user to take a look. This simple widget is definitely more about content than application functionality, which is all the more reason to make the grab prompt as effective as possible.

In any case, the Flash team had fun with it, and like all of the widgets we work on, this widget uses the Clearspring backend -- super-scalable distribution, sharing services, and tracking. Give it a shot with your own widgets.

Clearspring Recommendations

Here are a few of our own recommendations, not just on technical specifics, but on overall approach as well.

Choosing a Widget Type

Deciding what type of web widget to build is important; not all types of widgets will work on all destinations. If you are targeting Social Networks, you will want the content of your widget to be as "viral" as possible, encouraging users to grab it for themselves (using the edge services such as those from Clearspring). You'll also most likely want to build your widget in Flash, since some of the popular social networks do not allow javascript content.

Widgets targeted for Start Pages work best if they are designed as utilities (e.g., weather, calculators, web services adhsboards, etc) or are based on RSS content feeds. When targeting blogs, it often depends on the type of blogs; many different types of widgets may be a good fit. You can usually build widgets for Start Pages and Blogs in Flash or HTML, with or without Javascript.

Generally, there are a few broad audience segments you can think about when deciding how to target your widget:

• Bloggers or other providers that want to augment their content.
• Social networkers looking for ways to show personal expression.
• Start page users that want utility.

Sizing your Widget

Different sizes work better in different environments. Though your widget will be usable across the web, you will likely have a target audience in mind. The table below presents some recommendations on widget sizes, based on where you are targetting your widget.

We have generally found that a size of 300x250 will work in the most destinations, although is obviously not optimized for some.

Note that if you do plan to ad-serve your widget as a means of promotion, you should observe IAB design and sizing guidelines.

Your Widget's Functionality

You can build a widget to support almost any feature you can imagine. RSS feed readers, Games, Video Players, Audio Players, Profile Badges, Photos, Slideshows, and any number of specific end-user applications. Some general recommendations on making your web widget well-behaved:

• For maximum reliability, consider what the default widget behavior is, as well as the “empty" behavior when no data is available from a server.
• Do not auto-play video and audio.
• Make all URL references absolute -- relative references will only work on your own site.
• Pay attention to and design around MySpace's link-out limitations early in your design process.
• Use mouse-over effects to highlight to the user that the widget is interactive, and not just an image.
• Open links in new windows. Loading URLs in the existing window will avoid pop-up blockers, but will cause the entire website to load in the widget window if it is wrapped inside a div or iframe.

Effective Seeding Strategies

• Avoid posting the widget in typical ad-blind-spot areas (e.g. the right rail)
• Place the actual widget, and not a screenshot, on your seeding location.
• Communicate clearly that the widget is interactive, and encourage users to grab it, without assuming they will recognize it as such without actually clicking on it.
• Publish your widget to as many Widget Galleries as possible, and actively maintain your profile in these Galleries. (Clearspring can do this publication automatically)

Managing your Widget Over Time

• Use analytics tracking (such as Clearspring's) to keep track of key performance indicators:
  • Audience Extension: The percent of widget traffic coming from outside of your own domain vs. within your domain
  • Velocity: How often the number of widget locations doubles in size
  • Viral Hubs: The sites or pages that are the most influential in attracting viewers to grab your widget and share it amongst each other
• Realize that you can change the content of your widget even after it's deployed, especially if you are using a configuration mechanism such as Clearspring's. As long as you do not change sizing, or fundamentally alter the purpose of the widget, dynamically updating content is a proven effective way to keep your users engaged and to encourage to keep your widget on their page.

Recipes for Business Success

• Keep it simple
• Use compelling content
• Make it an app, not an add
• Make it social
• Seed it in context with your content
• Keep it fresh by updating it frequently
• Track it's spread

Additional Recommendations

• StickiWidgets offers 10 Things to Consider when Building Widgets
• Widgets Lab on Elements of a Winning Widget
• Niall Kennedy on Optimizing and Scaling Web Widget Performance

The goal of the Data Sharing Summit is to get a number of the key players, developers and platforms in the social networking, blogging and associated 'social software' platforms togeher in one room and hash out a bunch of key issues:

• interop testing between disparate systems
• standardized schemas, protocols and APIs
• mapping to proprietary platforms
• on-going efforts, including worldwide meetings

• How does this whole Parameters thing work?
• Do I need to make a new widget each time I want to change it's configuration (like for a video player)?

Happy Widgeting!

Here are the details:

• their API
• the deal with the contest
• a demo of their stuff, if you have no idea what they do

Have fun!

I admit I miss Amanda Congdon from the good old days of the seminal Rocketboom (though Joanne's great), so it's good to see her kicking it with the Member's Project folks in the videos highlighted in this widget -- there's a sort of vlog that tracks the project, called The Pulse.

Happy Widgeting

Happy Widgeting

It all made me think, being a widget-minded type, of all the cool awareness-building things that could be done with this kind of data. Perhaps a few folks are interested enough to use dedicated applications for rooting through this stuff (and there really are some cool ones), but I'd bet a whole lot more people could be brought into the fold if this kind of stuff were available right on blogs, start pages, social network pages, etc. For all you widget creators out there searching for something interesting to do, check out Sunlight and let us know if you do anything cool with it. I am sure the Sunlight folks would love to see lots of new people hitting their APIs as well.

And on this note, here's a fairly trivial yet oddly captivating example, a widget that lets you keep tabs on Senator Ted Stevens' [R, AK] voting record.

• An improved widget-creation/registration process, with some more descriptive choices and info on each of the steps, extra help links, and some UI prettying. It should be a little easier to understand what's going on now, especially for first-time users.
• Better tagging and tag-sorting in the widget console, for those of you with quite a few widgets in your accounts.
• New options for customizing the Widget Home Page, including several different layout options and the ability to customize it with your own CSS.
• Some back-end stuff that won't be directly visible, but that'll help with some other new features coming down the pipe.
• As usual, lots of little fixes and tweaks.
• And last but not least, a new FAQ to capture some of the more common questions we've been hearing.

As always, any questions, comments, problems etc on the updates, let us know in the forums. Happy Widgeting!

• This Thursday, the Refresh DC July Meetup
• On August 10th/11th, the extra-fun DCBarCamp

Also, we're planning a Clearspring meetup for the late summer/early fall as well, to kick off a broader set of meetups. If you'd be interested in coming, let me know here! I'll guage interest and we'll go from there.

Long live the nation's capital.

P.S., the DC Tech Events site is a great way to keep up with local goings-on in our not-the-valley locale.

We've also seen some really cool widgets coming from folks, I'll start PM'ing some of the creators to see if we can feature them here on the blog.

We're in the middle of wrapping up a dev cycle on the next update, will keep folks posted on what's in it when we do the release. As always, let us know how things are going in our forums. Happy widgeting.

Like all of the widgets that we build for clients, it uses our industrial-strength back-end distribution platform (the same one you can use for free). Come on over and see us.

• $5000 to a widget that gets 250K views/week
• $100K for building a business around Google

Want to make some money with your cool widget? Go for it!

This also raises those interesting questions that all those Facebook app developers are having to answer: how do you handle all the load when you actually manage to build the super-successful viral application/component and all of a sudden are dealing with a huge server need? One thing you can be sure of is that we won't slow you down -- we've got the best back-end in the business, folks. Seriously, our team is crazy good (not me, mind you, but the folks that actually do the work), and our scalability is one of the things that lands us those big content provider deals.

Go forth and multiply!

BarCampWashingtonDC

See you there...

As I mentioned earlier, we recently did a little bit of the ultraviolence on the platform documentation.  That is, a complete re-factor.  We organized it differently, in an attempt to help you find what you're looking for more easily, and added several new and expanded topics.  Specifically, two things I've seen some confusion around amongst our initial community users, that we're hoping to clarify:

Types of Widgets

What you can specify as your source URL when uploading a widget -- that is, what a widget URL actually is -- seems to have gotten some folks confused (yeah that's our fault).  Check out this page for a basic explanation.  There are some other "hidden" options that we'll discuss as we move forward, but this is the basic idea of what's supported.  Note that right now you cannot enter RSS feeds, for example, which we've seen many folks doing (we'll support that on our next update).

Widget Configuration

How widgets are configured, including dynamic configuration and configuration overrides, is one of the most important and powerful aspects of the platform, so we want to make sure it's totally clear how it all works.  This new section in the documentation covers it in a fair amount of detail

That's all for now, always looking for feedback on the quality and quantity of our docs and other supporting collateral.

We just finished an update to the production platform and collateral (woohoo).  Lots of small bug-fixes and incremental feature additions, as always with our interim updates, as well as some new things for the premium platform.  For our pals in the dev community, some things you probably care about:

• MS Spaces support
• Fixes for some problems with non-Flash widgets on various OS/browser combinations (they'll all work now ;-))
• A complete update on the documentation
• A refactor of the screenshot-taking code, so you should always have an accurate screenshot of your widget in action -- whatever default configuration your widget has, we'll make sure there's an accurate screenshot of it
  

And now for something completely different, a few links from the week (or so) in widgets:

• TechCrunch on MySpace still kickin' it
  
• Widget Blog on whether Facebook users count as users of your app
• Oh what a tanged web we weave: performance of Silverlight, DHTML, Flash, and more
  
• In the vein of widgets in the workplace, maybe, the kids like their web 2.0 in the office
• Dave Winer on opening up networking
• Fred Wilson, one of the folks that gets widget analytics, shares a comment from his blog
  
• More on metrics, from Om
• And for all the startups out there, some lessons from baseball