Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
We have written extensively
about widgets here at Read/WriteWeb because widgets offer a new, byte-size way to expose and consume online content. Widgets are really a win-win for all. Content providers and developers can instantly send their content
to many sites, while bloggers and portals can benefit from syndicated, richer content on their
pages. And as widgets are becoming more and more ubiquitous, end users become
more comfortable with widgets and the provided content.
There is clearly money to be made in the widget space, which is why it has been getting a lot of attention. Richard wrote an overview of the space back in June and I profiled Widgetbox, a market place for widget developers and widget consumers, during DEMOfall. Today we write about a newcomer, a company called ClearSpring, and their innovation in the widget space.
Clearspring, currently in preview, is working on widget technologies for widget developers. The company asked not to share any visuals of their offering until they launch in January, but was open about their plans. They have explained their strategy in terms of three major components:
Write once embed everywhere
The first offering aims to reduce the amount of custom coding that developers need to do to make their widgets available in various mediums. If you write a widget using the ClearSpring framework, they will take care of generating the right code to embed this widget into Netvibes, MySpace, popular blogs and in the near future PageFlakes, Google Desktop and other widget-enabled platforms. This is compelling, because each platform has its own way of doing things - like passing parameters to the widgets. The ability to write once and embed everywhere will save developers not only a lot of coding time, but also a lot of debugging and maintenance time.
Widget service container
This next offering is to my mind the most innovative one. The idea is that Clearspring wraps any given widget into a container with additional functions, like Share this widget via MySpace or Add this widget to my Blogger or TypePad blog. The container offers a set of services and each developer can decide which services make sense. The ones we see now are just the beginning - Clearspring is planning to provide a wide range of such services. This is a very interesting twist in the whole widget play, as it finds a way to deliver incremental value without forcing people to use proprietary APIs. The company also said that this strategy will drive the viral adoption of widgets, because it makes sharing and grabbing them very easy for the end users.
Widget usage analytics
Because the company wraps widgets into a container, they are also able to track the usage of widgets. This is an interesting and very useful service as it will allow developers to track which sites are most effective. The analytics data will be viewable on ClearSpring.com and will be similar to the traffic charts offered by most web hosting companies, only it will show the actual user clicks on the widget.
Conclusion
CleaSpring brings an interesting angle to the widget market. The idea of having a generic widget container with services is very powerful, as it decouples the widget essence from (often painful) integration work. The key to their success will be the execution, the packaging and of course the monetization strategy. The company is still exploring various possibilities in this area - and is looking for feedback from partners who are engaged in their preview program. It will be interesting to see what actually gets delivered in January.
Comments
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Sounds like a good idea but would like to see it more throughly after the preview mode.. But it's generally hard to persuade developers to use your service as a standard.. This may be a though problem they'll face in the following months.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | November 14, 2006 6:33 PM
Good ideas... I wonder if Google can beat them to the punch..
Already, Google has enabled adding Universal gadgets to any webpage with the inclusion of a script tag-- a very cool thing indeed which makes it easy to share and publicize gadgets without forcing people to add them to their google homepage. The write once, embed anywhere, is a definite pull for developers.
I guess the question will be if ClearSpring can 1) make an easy-to-use but featured API while 2) making it ridiculously easy to share widgets.
As someone who dabbles in Google Gadgets myself, I'd probably only switch over if I was wooed into thinking that it'd be easy to port my code over to ClearSpring, and that I'd get many more users by using ClearSpring.
Posted by: Pamela Fox | November 14, 2006 7:18 PM
Great idea. Making widgets for people to show on their own website is easy, but creating a widget to integrate with all those providers and show stats is a completely different story. If they get this right, I can see them being the next feedburner, offering stats for things that where untrackable before.
Posted by: Jeremy Luebke | November 15, 2006 7:19 AM
Show a me a useful widget. Which ones do you all use? Richard? Anyone? Any widget that you use daily. Any widget at all. I'm still waiting for a widget that's worth my attention. I do like the google embed via script tag trick though. Too bad I don't have their PR/engineering depts...
Posted by: Joel Hoard | November 15, 2006 8:03 AM