ReadWriteWeb

Clearspring Technologies, the maker of the AddThis widget that facilitates content sharing on the Internet, announced today that it has closed a $20 million round of funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP).

Clearspring is all about data. Big data. Lots of data. Data coming out of our ears data. Clearspring processes 10 terabytes of data per day. The AddThis button is on over nine million websites and has a billion unique users worldwide. Data is generated by users of the platform sharing content across social and news networks as well as when people visit sits that AddThis is embedded on. Clearspring will use this round of funding to accelerate its next-generation publishing products and continue growth of its advertising offerings.

It's a little bit scary, but widget and sharing service ClearSpring said this morning that the company's media widgets and newly acquired AddThis plug-in are now seen by more than 500 million unique viewers each month, according to Comscore. That's half the people on the internet, the company says.

That's a whole lot of information. ClearSpring sees not just what you're sharing, but nearly everything you're doing on the pages its products are on. (AddThis is on ReadWriteWeb, for example.) So what on earth is it going to do with all that data? Like they said in Spiderman, "with great power, comes great responsibility." We asked ClearSpring's CEO about these super hero-like responsibilities and his thoughts are below. You can decide for yourself whether he can be trusted, but the work the company is doing is very cool.