StickiWidgets

It’s been a long awaited announcement and it’s finally come. Clearspring has opened The Clearspring Community Platform and it’s free. We’ve had the luck of being part of the preview and it looks great. There are still things to add and some things to tweak but it’s a very polished system. For more information, check out the feature list, documentation, blog and forum.

A few things we really like about the platform. It was easy to add and configure a widget into the system. The interface was clean and stepped you through the process. Once the widget is added the power of the platform begins to show. The “Grab it!” feature allows anyone to easily get or push the widget to numerous web properties and social networks (11 at last count) or you can grab the code itself.

In addition to viral distribution of the widget through the widget, the Clearspring system can also publish the widget to existing widget galleries and start pages; currently Google Gadgets Gallery, Live Gadget Gallery , Netvibes Widget Library and Pageflakes Flake Chooser.

To wrap up all this widget goodness Clearspring tracks and reports on the widgets. This is great to actually be able to know how a widget is performing and where. There are 5 reporting categories and with more detailed reports within each.

1. Views: how many times the widget has been viewed
2. Unique views: how many individual users viewed the widget
3. Locations: where the widget is placed
4. Viral hubs: where the widget is being spread from
5. Geographic: where in the world are users viewing from

For developers there is also the beginnings of an API. It’s currently very sparse but it’s a good sign to see Clearspring developing an API for their platform.

And… If you’re large (lucky) enough to need an enterprise-class widget platform, there is the Premium Platform to consider.

While it’s not perfect and there a few more things we would like to see, Hooman and his team have done a great job overall and we look forward to more from Clearspring.

Read/WriteWeb has a great write-up on “Business Models For Start Pages”. It’s definitely a good read for those of you interested in the various companies and the business around it. In particular we like the following paragraph regarding “The Widgetizing of the Web”.

So widgets/gadgets are ramping up to be a key part of the Web platform going forward, which all the start pages (big and small) are ideally placed to leverage. And the smaller start pages have certainly not shied away from building up their platforms. Pageflakes now has 100 “flakes” (i.e. widgets) and recently introduced more customization options. Likewise, Netvibes is putting in a lot of work on their module ecosystem. - Read/WriteWeb

The article puts the start page products and services in very good light and with a decent future ahead. Time will tell…

For those of you less concerned about the business and more interested in start pages as a user, you should give the post and its comments a quick read for links to various products and services. Give them a spin, you might find one that you like.

Don’t forget that we have a widget for managing and staying in contact with your Stickam friends. The widget is currently in preview mode and has been tested to work with Pageflakes, Netvibes and other services.

Read that Netvibes hit 5 million users so we decided to go check them out. Netvibes is another web based start page much like Pageflakes. It also includes a Web Page Module which we were able to use with our Contacts widget.

The Stickam Contacts Widget seems to be working well and if the trend of Web Page modules/flakes continues, we will most likely continue with our current approach. By developing only one version of the widget, we will be able to better control and manage the service. We do not have the resources to develop and maintain separate widgets for each of these services. While site specific widgets would have more interesting features, we believe that this approach is still the best at this time.