Oatmeal Stout – Justin Thorp’s blog

I think today should be the official “Hug a Clearspring Engineer Day!”  Today,  we made two really awesome announcements.

We’ve released an updated share menu. It’s been redesigned and looks dead sexy.  It’s smart.  It’ll figure out where you like to share and populate those destinations to the top.  It’s super customizable.  It’s also worldly.  The new menu will detect and support a bunch of languages.

Tons of high fives and hugs to our engineering and product team.  They rock.  They’ve been heads down working on this for so long now.  We’re all super pumped about it.

BTW – If you’re a WordPress.com user like me, they’ve super improved that whole interaction process.  When you publish a widget, it no longer goes straight live to the world.  It goes to a draft and the menu will give you the option to open the draft in a new window. 

Also… Clearspring has announced that according to September ComScore numbers we’re retaken the lead as the biggest widget distribution platform. “Clearspring logged 254 million unique visitors worldwide in September, easily outdistancing its nearest competitor by 93 million visitors.”  We “experienced a 59 percent increase in worldwide usage of its sharing service between August and September.”

So start sharing content online with Clearspring.  Try out the new menu and let me know what you think – justin@clearspring.com

At Clearspring, we just noticed recently that both John McCain and Barack Obama have widgets that use Clearspring’s Launchpad.

We’re glad that Clearspring can be something that brings both candidates together.

We recently found something that they both have in common. Both John McCain and Barack Obama use Clearspring’s Launchpad as the widget platform to syndicate the widgets for their Presidential campaigns. (The widgets are to the right and below.)

So… make sure that when November 4th roles around that you get out and vote and in the meantime make lots and lots of Clearspring widgets.

On Friday, we were having fun at Clearspring playing some foosball so I decided to make a little video.  Enjoy!

So… as you all know, this morning, Clearspring announced its acquistion of AddThis.  Well our CEO Hooman Radfar has just recently published a blog post about it, which I think is worth reading.

Here’s an excerpt…

Our vision is to create an open sharing platform connecting publishers, advertisers, and developers. This platform will enable a true first on the web – enabling users to leverage any web-based service from within the context of any application, anywhere. As we move towards this vision, Clearspring will continue deliver the best widget distribution and monetization services possible and AddThis will continue it’s run towards the goal of becoming the most ubiquitous sharing tool for publishers. Shortly, however, you will start to see the beginnings of this vision come to life.

Big news today at Clearspring HQ.  We’ve acquired the bookmark and content sharing service AddThis, the button thats frickin’ all over the Web.  Together, we make the most comprehensive set of sharing services on the Web.  We’re all really pumped.

Venture Beat did a really nice write up.  Here’s an excerpt:

Clearspring, the widget creation platform, has acquired AddThis, the bookmarking and sharing button, for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition moves Clearspring closer to becoming a service that allows any users to share content from any website.

AddThis will initially remain its own service. Through the acquisition, Clearspring reports that the two services combined will be reach approximately 200 million users and 300,000 publishers.

Also… check out the story on Digg.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

Ever wonder what a widget is and why you should care?  Well, I was lead writer on a white paper that we wrote here at Clearspring on that very topic. I just announced it on the Clearspring blog.

We were recently discussing different tools we could give to the people to help them understand widgets and the value proposition of Clearspring. We decided to write up a quick white paper. It’s entitled “What’s a Widget and Why Is it Important? (PDF)”

I’d encourage you to download it, read it, and send me comments. Let me know what you think. E-mail me at justin@clearspring.com.

Over the weekend, we saw something really neat.  Saturday Night Live did an amazingly funny skit about Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton.  They made it available online in a Flash player that was widgetized and made shareable through Clearspring’s Launchpad widget platform.  With all this, what do you get?  You get what CNN has called a “a global Internet sensation.”

Tomorrow, I’m demoing Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad at Startup SF.  If you’re in San Francisco, would love to see you there.

On September 10th, I’ll be at StartUp SF demoing Clearspring’s widget platform Launchpad. Its from 6-9pm at 8th Floor Cafe of Orrick, Herrinton & Sutcliffe (@ 405 Howard St in San Francisco). It costs $10 online in advance / $20 at the door.

A bunch of us here at Clearspring are really bummed that the online music radio provider Pandora may be facing extinction due to a massive hike in royalty fees for Internet radio stations.

So… we’re calling everyone to action.  We’ve created the Web site I Heart Pandora and a widget that you can use as a way to tell the world that you love Pandora just as much as we do.  The widget includes a link about how you can take action.

Put the widget on your blog, social networking profile, and Twitter about it.  We don’t want services like Pandora and all Internet radio stations to go away.

More on this from Hooman Radfar and Rich LaBarca.

At Clearspring, we’re getting pretty excited about SXSW coming up in March of next year.  So… we made a badge for those of you who’ve just registered.  Tell the world you’ll be there.