Since last November, Clearspring’s widget syndication platform has served up analytics on over 4.2 billion widget views for clients like Time, NBC, Universal, and Maxim. Tonight, Clearspring is opening up their platform to any developer, letting you write, track, and distribute web widgets across a multitude of websites and platforms. They will also feature a forum to support their developers. The announcement puts them into competition with WidgetBox’s analytics and distribution platform, and Widgipedia’s knowledge base.
Clearspring’s platform lets developers code a widget once and dynamically serve it an embed on any websites, Google Gadgets, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Live.com within their wrapper. All a developer needs to do is point Clearspring to their widget’s source code.
Clearspring’s wrapper tracks analytics for your widget and dynamically sets parameters for your widget. It also includes a customizable “grab it” button that lets you get the embed code or import it into a variety of social sites. All the analytics data is available through a dashboard. The dashboard breaks the data down by type (visits/uniques), source domain, and geography of the visitor. Within the dashboard you can also analyze how your widget is spreading and identify the “viral hubs” helping your widget take off the ground.
Since Clearspring can set your widget’s parameters, it not only means users can edit the widgets settings, but that you can create widgets on the fly through their API. One example of a dynamic widget is the NBA player card below, which can generate a card for any NBA player based on the parameters fed to Clearspring.
Clearspring is funded by $8 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, along with various angels. Check out more in Clearspring’s profile.
That’s a really good idea. Never heard of any site like it.
It makes me think about how long everyone can ride the widget train. I mean at some point there’s going to be extreme saturation. Once a roll your own widget company opens up widget development to the general public making it easy to make your own and deploy them everywhere it will be spam spam spam. I know it’s a little off-topic but this widget business has me all worked up.
I agree with what Brian said
I believe one can already make their own simple google gadgets, webclip was just announced by apple, and their are a whole host of services out there that can benefit from the extra distribution and usage of their service while the consumer is viewing other sites. It seems this company is providing added value to companies (or people) creating the widgets creators on top of offering the ability to easily create them. As far as spam is concerned, this is an opt-in situation where the consumer either won’t install a “spammy” widget or will uninstall it as as that’s discovered.
Yes Brian, we are soon going to be widget saturated.
Springwidgets.com has been up and allowing people to produce and distribute widgets though either an instant widget process or an advanced social, web and desktop API since November of last year.
We have not noticed significant spam-related widget creation. Widgets in general are a consumer-distributed platform, and it’s unlikely that a large audience would voluntarily distribute spam unless it was very cleverly disguised as content.
Good luck Hoo!
-Don
Good point Don. Widgets aren’t a new distribution platform, they are a tool that makes it easy for consumers themselves to redistribute content. And I agree that it is hard to imagine consumers wanting to proliferate spam.
We already are Widget saturated /
- Yahoo Pipes / kinda makes your own widget -
- the simplier you can make it for a user to make a widget / the simplier the widget is going to be - therefore ….
- it wouldnt work so well …. - RB
Sounds like a pretty cool widget platform. Really like the idea that you can get analytics on your widget.
I think you will see that quality will now matter more than ever with all of the widget choices out there. It means that companies that want to execute a widget strategy need to give more thought to audience, value proposition, feature set, experience, etc. Just having a widget is not a widget strategy.
The measurement and analytics will be critical in understanding your success and failure and iterating until the right balance is reached between user experience, value, and syndication. Platforms like clearspring and yourminis will be critical in helping content providers and 3rd party developers through this process.