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You have about 100 days left till April 5th, 2010 when your Clearspring widgets will stop working (unless you switch to their AddThis platform, Gigya or another widget sharing provider).  In general, deprecating (or doing away with) your APIs in this way is not a good idea to grow your customer base! A lot of widgets “in the wild” will quit working on April 5th and will only serve to irritate users who want to share widgets and publisher who don’t have access to the original widget source code or who simply cannot upgrade them. You can consult the Clearspring transition guide for more information. But here is a high level summary:

  • Clearspring hosted widgets: Widgets that user Clearspring hosting will be most adversely affected. After April 5th, they will simply “disappear”.
  • Clearspring In-Kernel API: Widgets that were developed correctly (with support for error handling) may continue functioning correctly but sharing and reporting will no long work. Many widgets without proper support for error handling will hang or generate errors.
  • Reporting and Analytics: This will go away entirely with no planned future support. According to Clearspring: “AddThis does NOT offer analytics for widget views and widget interactions.” – Clearspring suggests you use Google Analytics or Omniture – good luck people!

Recommendations:

  • Switch to Gigya: Based on what we know, AddThis is NOT an adequate replacement for the existing Clearspring API since reporting, analytics and the Launchpad are all going away! Gigya provides the same level of sharing support, is easier to implement and has comparable reporting capabilities.
  • Host your Own Widgets: Avoid “solutions” that promise “free” hosting, either host it yourself or pay your social media or widget developer to host it for you. Don’t be fooled twice, there is no “free lunch” on the Internet (at least not for very long).
  • Build or Buy Better Widgets: Most of our widgets and widget platforms are XML-driven and built to allow clients to switch out or replace their widget sharing and analytics provider on the fly. Most widget running on the Widgetmatic 600 platform, for example, will automatically switch to Gigya with no re-work, re-deployment or re-adjustment necessary. In the future, consider a similar “plug-n-play” sharing approach that will allow you to switch out widget sharing providers.
  • Start Implementing a Migration Strategy: Music labels, publishers and entertainment companies with a large inventory of widgets need to starting thinking about and implementing a migration strategy for their widgets, or your investment in “viral marketing” is simply going to go away come April 5th! Contact us if you need help in putting such a plan in place. We’ll help you identify and inventory your widget assets, and work with you to transition them over to new sharing and analytics provider.

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