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September 2007Welcome Clearspringers!Summer may be winding down, but we're busier than ever here at Clearspring. This is the first of our bimonthly newsletters to keep you up to date with our latest developments and why you should care. We trust you'll find this useful, and would love your feedback. Widget SpotlightClearspring recently launched a widget to aid promotion of Gossip Girl, a new television show debuting this Fall on the CW Television Network. Widgets are rapidly becoming a standard component of any multimedia campaign. They're a successful tool for extending your market reach, through viral distribution, and maintaining a connection with your audience during and after a campaign. Your widget placements and views provide instantly-available success metrics. Innovation Note: This widget features the very first "viral peel." The peel looks like the corner of paper bent over, flapping gently, on the top right corner of the widget. When clicked, it reveals to the user that they can grab and share the widget to their own page for more "gossip" -- yet another way to drive the viral spread of your widgets. We're really excited about this one and hope you'll check it out. Post it to your page! The Gossip Girl widget currently features video, character sells and daily gossip updates provided by People.com. The show is based on the #1 New York Times bestselling book series about the provocative lives of young New York City socialites attending its most prestigious private schools. To get in on the gossip, tune into the CW on Wednesdays 9/8pm central. Featured NewsFacebook Widget/App ConverterWe've recently introduced a whole new approach to widgets on Facebook. Our simple step-by-step wizard guides you through registering your widgets as Facebook applications. On Facebook, you get all their added features (like drag and drop support on user profiles and intra-Facebook distribution) while retaining all our viral tools for moving widgets to other popular destinations.
Some highlights:
You can learn all about this feature in our docs. We're continually updating it to keep up with our development. More Supported Drop PointsWe've been continuing to increase the breadth of our support for all of the different destinations out there, and have recently announced several new drop points. Check the blog for updates as they happen, but the latest list of supported destinations is:
Other Development GoodiesWe've got a few things coming soon in the development pipeline, so keep an eye on our blog for announcements. Some of the things on the way include:
Monthly TipAs you start converting your widgets into Facebook Applications, remember to take the time to create an effective About Page on Facebook after you're done with the wizard. Facebook users visit About Pages as they discover applications through the news feed and product directory. Maximize the impact of this page by showing what the widget is, what it can do for them (features, benefits), and how to get more information (FAQs, website, etc). You can use images and HTML. A concise and catchy About Page will aid in adoption of your application. You can always go back and fill in this information at a later time by logging into your Facebook account and clicking on "edit about page" within your application. Upcoming Events: WidgetDevCamp DCWe're proud to be sponsoring and helping to organize a community event all about widgets, WidgetDevCamp DC. Designers, developers, product marketers -- anyone interested in the potential of widgets and other distributed applications (including Facebook) -- come on out! This is a DevCamp style event, where we can all get together to brainstorm, share ideas, and even write some code. WidgetDevCamp-DC.org for all the details, and you can subscribe to the mailing list as well. See you there! Additional ResourcesA friendly reminder of some of the resources that can help you be successful with the Clearspring Platform:
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