Team USA has been promoting their athletes and the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver with a couple of widgets. With the games just 8 days away, we thought we should take a closer look at the widgets.
The widgets themselves are pretty straight forward. The 2 widgets are essentially the same widget in 2 sizes. Both widgets are 300 pixels wide with one being a standard IAB 300×250 pixels. In each widget you get video and athlete content along side a twitter feed. The twitter feed is a nice touch as it gives the widget fresh content more quickly and engages the visitors in the conversation.
As standard practice, you can share this widget and this is where the widget gets interesting for us. Now that Clearspring has announce the end of their Launchpad platform in favor of the AddThis product, a few key items have surfaced as a result of the transition to the AddThis sharing platform.
Built-in gadget, app and embed sharing are now gone as they are not currently supported by AddThis. Google gadgets has been replaced with Google Bookmarks, apps were replaced with stream/feed posts and embeds are now up to the widget coders to support on their own. These changes are not necessarily bad, but they were nice features within Launchpad (not to mention a slew of other features but we’ll save that for another post).
So far so good, even with the loss of the Google Gadgets and Facebook/MySpace Apps.
Read more…
The AddThis Sharebar was released into beta back on December 17, 2009. We’ve played around with it on a couple of sites and generally it’s been a good experience. Getting the code and deploying on a site is dead simple, just copy and paste some code. Out of the box you get the all the sharing features as you would expect. One of the features we really liked is the personalized services feature. What that does is it presents a list of personalized sharing options based on the user. So, if I share to Twitter more frequently than any other service, the Twitter icon would be the first option. You don’t have to lock yourself into a specific list of services, just let AddThis manage the personalized list of top services for each individual.
There were a couple of things we thought AddThis could have done better on. While there are a good number of customizations and options available, we felt that it could be expanded. For example, something like a fixed width on the Sharebar to match that of the site. The AddThis staff have indicated they are evaluating more customization options and will add them as appropriate.
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Press Release (via email):
StyleCaster Unveils “Daily Looks” Widget
What’s the Temperature? What should I wear? StyleCaster has the answer.
New York, New York, July 9, 2009: Today StyleCaster unveils the “Daily Looks” widget, where it delivers not only the weather, but also three looks that rotate 360 degrees in HD quality styled by leading stylists and fashion influencers. Starting today, members can download the application onto their blog, FaceBook page, Apple Dashboard, or wherever else they live on the web.
StyleCaster is continuously innovating to create new utilities to meet everyday needs. “The first two questions people ask themselves every morning when they wake up are: What’s the temperature? What do I wear?” said Meg Cuna, Chief Content Officer of StyleCaster. “These two questions were the inspiration behind StyleCaster’s ‘Daily Looks’.”
Users can also at any time change their location, at which point it will upload three new looks corresponding to the weather condition in the new area. When users click on a look, StyleCaster automatically directs them to the look’s homepage so that they can learn who styled the looks and see more about each product in the ensemble.
About StyleCaster:
StyleCaster, which recently announced a $4 million round of funding, is a new online platform that provides individuals access to the world of fashion. From style tips optimized for each individual, the latest fashion trends, and a niche social network, to a large catalog of brand-name clothing and the ability to buy fashion items with just a few clicks of the mouse, StyleCaster combines community, content and commerce – and does so based on each member’s personal taste and style.
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This is a widget we built for fun, so there’s no review, just info.
Where would like to go today? is a widget for checking out places through Google Maps and photos of nearby destinations.
- Enter a location and click “Go!”
- You will be presented with a map of your location and photos of nearby places
- Use this to help plan your next trip or travels
- Use this to daydream
- Or, use this to just get away for a few minutes
- Click on “Get & Share” to get or put this widget on your favorite site/location
- Default location changes on occasion based on our own interests at any given moment
- Search for near by points of interest such as hotels & restaurants (added 2009-10-14)
Read more…
Congratulations to Hooman and the gang over at Clearspring.
According to Comscore, over 520 million unique viewers each month is the reach of Clearspring’s sharing platform. That makes Clearspring the largest distributed sharing platform on the web covering half of the people on the internet worldwide.
Here’s a great write up/interview over at ReadWriteWeb,
Clearspring Sees What 1/2 The Internet is Doing (API Coming Soon).
Hooman also posted some information on his blog regarding some upcoming updates to AddThis. Here’s a snippet from his post Moving to One Sharing Platform – AddThis vision being realized…
“Before, AddThis specialized in enabling users to share links back to your website. Now with our API, you can also enable your users to post embeddable content like videos, photos and more – taking your site experience with them. We have leveraged our experience with widgets at Clearspring to provide a simple approach that we think will be truly powerful. We’ll be doing another update to this capability soon that will enable even more of the powerful widget-sharing functionality from Clearspring to be leveraged via AddThis.”
We’re looking forward to what interesting things Clearspring has in the works. Sounds like they’ve got some great things lined up.
