Since last November, Clearspring’s widget syndication platform has served up analytics on over 4.2 billion widget views for clients like Time, NBC, Universal, and Maxim. Tonight, Clearspring is opening up their platform to any developer, letting you write, track, and distribute web widgets across a multitude of websites and platforms. They will also feature a forum to support their developers. The announcement puts them into competition with WidgetBox’s analytics and distribution platform, and Widgipedia’s knowledge base.
Clearspring’s platform lets developers code a widget once and dynamically serve it an embed on any websites, Google Gadgets, Netvibes, Pageflakes, and Live.com within their wrapper. All a developer needs to do is point Clearspring to their widget’s source code.
Clearspring’s wrapper tracks analytics for your widget and dynamically sets parameters for your widget. It also includes a customizable “grab it” button that lets you get the embed code or import it into a variety of social sites. All the analytics data is available through a dashboard. The dashboard breaks the data down by type (visits/uniques), source domain, and geography of the visitor. Within the dashboard you can also analyze how your widget is spreading and identify the “viral hubs” helping your widget take off the ground.
Since Clearspring can set your widget’s parameters, it not only means users can edit the widgets settings, but that you can create widgets on the fly through their API. One example of a dynamic widget is the NBA player card below, which can generate a card for any NBA player based on the parameters fed to Clearspring.
http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/45881d714d8ff0fd/466ef9af70d2cb55/lebron_james/fccb82d0
Clearspring is funded by $8 million from Novak Biddle, ZG Ventures, along with various angels. Check out more in Clearspring’s profile.