Widgets From Start to Finish

As many of you have read, we announced a partnership with Clearspring today. Our goal in working with Clearspring is to provide an end-to-end solution which covers your widget creation, deployment, management and monetization needs. All this integrated with your site’s social graph via KickApps. Starting today three main things will come out of this:

1) KickApps will work with Clearspring to get the KickApps Widget Studio into Clearspring’s customers’ hands.
What this means: The KickApps Widget Studio is a self service WYSIWYG widget authoring environment where anyone (whether you’re a developer or not) can create and manage an unlimited number of widgets. Since its beta release a few months ago, we’ve added a lot of new features, including the ability to create widgets from scratch using components and images, as well as leveraging our pre-made templates (video player, slide show, 3D slide show and lists). We’re working a many more templates and features that will roll out in the coming weeks.

Here are some examples of widgets that have been built and deployed using the Widget Studio.

Bonnaroo Video Widget sized to a 300 x 250 WidgeAD(TM):

WTOV’s TOV Tube:

2) KickApps will use Clearspring’s one-click distribution and leading analytics and tracking applications on all KickApps widgets.
What this means: One of the coolest features of widgets is its viralness. With a simple click of the share button, your users will be able to place your widget on a variety of social media sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Wordpress, Blogger, hi5 and Vox. Your users syndicate your site’s content around the web and that widget acts as an ‘ad’ which drives traffic back to your website. We call this a WidgeAD(TM)–an interactive ad unit.

For example, as a user I may really like one of the videos on your site and want to share it with my MySpace friends. I simply click the ‘Share’ button and you’ll be presented with a number of direct links to your favorite sites. In this case, I click on the MySpace logo, login, and bang, it’s on my MySpace profile page.

With Clearspring’s tracking and analytics you’ll have detailed information about how many times your widget has been viewed, where it was viewed and placed, and the number of unique viewers, placements and click throughs.

3) KickApps will collaborate with Clearspring establish the industry standards around WidgeADs.
What this means: Widgets are becoming an increasingly important component of your web strategy. We believe that the power of widgets as advertising units has largely been untapped. Working with Clearspring and their ad network we’re going to make it easy for web publishers to earn revenue from their widgets. Stay tuned for more information as we roll this out shortly.

For further reading, check out MediaPost, Mashable, Adotas and CenterNetworks.