Updated Console Design

At Clearspring, in addition to making your widget easy to distribute and track, we want them to be easy to manage. So… today we released a brand new look for our widget console.

Before, the navigation was down the side and we were getting feedback saying that our users wanted more screen real estate to configure our sexy new sharing menu and look at our analytics reports. Now the navigation is across the top, positioned as clickable tabs (see tabs outlined in yellow in the screen shot above).

Also… if you scroll down to the very bottom of the console, we’ve added a really rad small Easter egg. You can change the color theme for the console. You have your choice between blue, black, green, orange, and hot pink. (Thanks Foo!)

Address Book Integration with the Sharing Menu

Often when I’m sharing content, I want to share it to one person in particular instead of Facebook or Twitter as a whole. For a while now, we’ve had e-mail sharing but then you have to remember a person’s e-mail address. That’s a pain. Well with today’s release, we’ve launched integration with your Yahoo Mail or GMail address books. As you can see from the screen shots above, all you have to do is pick your e-mail provider, stick in your e-mail username and password, and it will suck down your contacts. You then decide with whom you want to share each specific widget. It’s super easy.

Something to note… if you have a lot of contacts in your address book, it may take a moment to suck them all down.

AddThis Update

We’ve also done a pretty substantial update to AddThis. Make sure you subscribe to the AddThis blog to stay updated.

Feedback

We’d love to hear your feedback on these features. E-mail me - justin@clearspring.com

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.

The folks from Springrolled and Wijard have made their own video to describe to folks what Clearspring is and does. The best part is the video is done completely with with pieces of paper and toy gears.  Thanks guys!

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.

The 2nd Annual Mashable Open Web Awards (http://mashable.com/openwebawards/home/) is now accepting nominations and their selection process is based on nominations and voting generated from the Web at large. So, we’re asking our customers to take a brief moment to fill out the attached Mashable widget form and submit a nomination for Clearspring in the Embeddable Widgets category.

It’s quick and it’s easy. All you need to do is enter an active email address, hit the submit button and then verify your nomination when they send you a confirmation email. Here’s the voting widget, feel free to post it to and share it from your favorite social network. Make sure you click the black “get & share” button.

http://www.clearspring.com/widgets/4918b43816785512

As the Web’s leading widget network, Clearspring helps publishers like you extend your audience on the Web. We are dedicated to making it as easy as possible for end users to share your content. And, best of all, the Clearspring platform is free. So, if you have a moment, please vote to nominate Clearspring before 11:59 PM on November 16, 2008. Thanks!

Best Regards,

Justin Thorp
Clearspring Community Manager

…and I approve this message

PS: Do you use AddThis, the world’s most widely used social bookmarking button on the Web? If so, can you show them some love? Vote for them below:

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

Our friend iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett has recently launched with the District of Columbia Apps for Democracy. It’s a challenge to developers and agencies from around the country to take the public data produced by the District of Columbia (DC) government and create interesting applications and visualizations that will help make lives easier.

This is a great opportunity to innovate and find new interesting uses for this otherwise not that exciting data. Plus, At the end of the contest, 60 prizes will be handed out ranging from $100 to $2000 for a total of $20,000. Oh and it’s not limited to people in the DC area.

So if you have sometime this weekend, bang out a quick app or widget. You could potentially make some cash and help make people’s lives easier.

I’d love to see someone make some Clearspring widgets for the contest. If you make something, send it my way and I’ll try and highlight it on the blog. My e-mail address is - justin@clearspring.com

Over the last few years, it’s been a blast to watch the rise of and get to know Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s Director of Operations at Wine Library a New Jersey-based wine shop that decided to go online. As a way to reach new audiences, he decided to start the online video show Wine Library TV, which turned him and the Wine Library into a viral sensations and dominate brands.

In a recent video on his personal site (embedded above), conveys the same belief that we have, that the existence of online communities has amplified the ability for word-of-mouth and sharing to take place between people.

Here at Clearspring, our goal is to make it as easy a possible for that word-of-mouth marketing and sharing to take place on the Web. All of these different online communities and destinations are very fragmented, utilizing different standards, and processes. At Clearspring, we help to bridge the gap.  We make it so that a publisher can make their content shareable to all these places, regardless.

Wanna make your content shareable? Drop me a line. I’d love to chat and figure out how we can help. - justin@clearspring.com

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.