• $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

It's pretty clear how to get your widget into the Clearspring platform, but once it's there, how do you send it out across the web?  This post is a slightly more in-depth version of what's currently in the documentation, we'll update that in the next few days.

You have several options for getting your widget out into the world, and it all starts with one or more seeding points -- locations that you set up and from which initial users can obtain your widget.  All Clearspring-enabled widgets get the viral sharing options (via the dock that sits below your widget and the menu that it pops up), so the idea is that once the widget is initially seeded, users will then be able to get it from existing instances, without having to go back to a central seeding point.  Of course, if you are a site developer or owner and want to allow users to obtain your widget from your own site, you can do that as well. 

The Clearspring Widget Homepage

Each and every Clearspring-enabled widget can be given a default homepage on the Clearspring site, from which users can grab the widget. You can hand out links to this page however you want.  Soon (real soon), some gallery syndication partners and indexing search engines will even suck your widget in from this page.

It's up to you whether or not your widget has a public homepage, you can set this from within the Widget Console, in the Share it -> Widget homepage tool.

Using your Widget's Code

The most low-tech way to seed your widget from a site or page of your own is to just include the Clearspring-enabled widget there.  Users visiting the appropriate page on your site will see your widget, and can use the standard dock to  get it for themselves, wherever they want it.

You can get the code to include on your page from the Widget Console, in the Share it -> Get the code tool.

Gallery Publication

If you want to allow your widget to be visible in various external Widget Galleries, Clearspring can help you there as well.  You can use the Widget Console's Share it -> Publish to galleries tool to publish your widget into the leading galleries.  Putting your widget into any of these galleries doesn't change the fact that you're widget will have all the Clearspring features, but it will also be visible to users of those gallery sites.  For widgets that don't need a tremendous amount of context and make sense to be distributed outside of your own website, the gallery publication option is a great one.

Using the Placement API

If you are distributing your  widget from your own website, and want to be able to hand visitors code snippets that they can use to embed your widget, you can actually generate these using our Placement API.  The API lets you ask the Clearspring system for code snippets for specific configurations of specific widgets.  This is a powerful mechanism for sites that want greater control of the user experience of giving code to users.

Wrapping Up

Taking these options together, Clearspring gives you a number of powerful ways to distribute your widgets across the web, and you should be able to find one that matches your target use case.  If not, or if you have any other perspective to share, feel free to let us know in the forums.

Until next time...

We're always anxious to know what you think, and what kinds of experiences you're having with the initial functionality of our dev platform.  We've got a lot coming down the pipe for developers, and every bit of feedback will help us prioritize it.  Our newly-live Developer Forums are a great place to go for all discussions widget.  You can use the Help and Feedback forums for issues (gasp!) and to share your great ideas for what you want Clearspring to do for you.  The forums are also where we'll initially keep you up to date with various samples and how-to type information (like this post on syndicating YouTube).  You can even post widgets to the forums if you want.

Also, we're pretty excited to be hosting the Marketplace forum.  The Marketplace was set up with the idea that widget development is all about bringing diverse skillsets together to do cool things, so we're hoping the forum can help you connect with folks to help you build out your widget vision (or pay you for your coding chops).  Have a great widget idea and need a crack Flash developer?  Are you an expert coder and looking for a gig?  By all means, feel free to cruise on over and start posting what you're looking for, or what you have to offer.    See you there...  

We've had a busy week here at Clearspring -- thanks to the over 500 users that have signed up for the platform and started deploying their widgets! To all of you that have joined us in the last week, thanks!  We've seen a number of awesome widgets hosted on the platform, and a lot of experimentation as well.  Keep it coming!  We're learning more each day about what you are trying to use the platform for, and how we can make it easier.  We also love seeing all the Clearspring widgets out in the wild!

We'll be building out our FAQs and other documentation to cover more parts of the platform, and also adding some tools to help on the widget creation side.  Let us know in the forums if there are docs, samples or how-tos that would help.  There are also lots of great tools out in the world for widget creation, and we'll start recommending some that we like.  And though our primary focus is on industrial-strength distribution and analytics, we're also adding some more templates and tools on the creation side.

Also, wanted to let you know that we've done a few updates, and have more coming, for some misc issues folks have identified.  Apologies if they've caused you any headache:

• url override params for Javascript widgets were not working, now they are
• we're deploying various fixes to make the registration process easier and more intuitive

P.S. I'm Will, and I'm here to help. I'm looking forward to building a great developer community together...see you on the platform!

Over the last couple months, we have had the good fortune to work with content partners like Maxim, NBA, NBC Universal, Time and RockYou.  Not only have we worked with some stellar partners on the content side, but we have also worked with leading widget-friendly destinations like Microsoft Live, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Freewebs, Friendster and more to make the ecosystem a better place for us all.  

As we nailed down how to serve and process real-time analytics at scale with these folks earlier this year (that was hard), we started to kick around some ideas about how to get our friends from the developer community more into the mix.  The idea was simple.  Can we help anyone kick-start their own syndication strategy?  Specifically, could Clearspring make it easy for every web developer to make, share and track widgets?  And so Preview Program was born.  Thousands requested accounts.   Millions of widgets were served.   Fires were put out.  Some stuff worked.  Some didn’t.  But with your help, we built some cool stuff.

Recently, we have been inundated with requests.  Our widget serving rate went nuts.  Although we all wanted to do more stuff, we figured it was about time to let everyone play together.   We are happy to announce that the preview is over.   The Clearspring Community Platform is now open for development.  Oh yea, and it’s free.  

Now you can use the same technology being leveraged by industry leading brands to get your widgets out and about in a jiffy.  We provide a set of tools to transform your content and applications into widgets, syndicate widgets easily across multiple platforms, and leverage our robust analytics to track the spread of your widgets in real-time.  Want to get started?  Check out our feature run-down and create an account.

This is just the first step.  We have a ton to do and are trying some new stuff out in real-time with this release.  But we hope that together we can put a dent in the universe and transform the entire web.  We created a developer center with documentation, a forum and this blog.  Ping us there or email us so we can jam out to build what’s next.  Thanks to everyone for all their interest, feedback and support.   We love working with you and are excited to make many more friends in the widgetsphere.  We are truly excited to work with you all. 

Let the games begin,
Hooman

p.s. I will continue to blog on the space on Widgify, but will post Clearspring-related stuff here.  :)