Clearspring

When I started this project I settled on using Clearspring as my widget platform. It has a number of attractive features that influenced my decision.

• It offers turnkey syndication to many popular "start page" or personal page sites like iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc.
• It offers turnkey syndication to blogs and other services like Blogger, Digg, Stumble, etc.
• It was based on standard and well known technologies like Javascript and Flash.
• It has amazing analytics including:
  
• Number of widget views.
  
• Number of unique viewers.
• Domains that views are coming from.
  
• Viral hubs that are spreading the widget.
  
• Where people are viewing the widget from geographically.
  
• 3D graphs and charts with modifiable date ranges and data sets for custom reporting.
• The "get & share" button that makes it easy for viewers who like the widget to simply grab it, customize it's settings, and automatically add it to their favorite pages via their turnkey syndication or by embedding.

All in all Clearspring has turned out to be a decent choice.

There are some things that I think they need to work on however. First, I feel they should offer at least two out of the box configurations for the "get and share" button. Widgets that have a larger width than height do not play well with their default button layout.

They offer a Premium platform that offers customization options for the button but the cost is prohibitive for people like me who are doing this with no start-up funding and all expenses coming out of pocket.

It's unclear to me why they see the customizable "get & share" button as being a value add. Personally I see more value in their analytics and turnkey syndication than their button customization.

I need to learn Flash and write a version of the widget in it so that it will work on sites that disable or gimp Javascript like MySpace and Facebook. If anyone knows a good Flash tutorial or book let me know.