You have about 100 days left till April 5^th, 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 5^th 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 5^th, 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 5^th! 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.

Thought I would share a couple of recent posts on our sister blog sites that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

• Atlantic Records and Social Media Marketing
  Shares a great presentation by Atlantic Records’s Eric Snowden
• Metablock’s Artistmatic Music Analytics Dashboard in Beta
  Announces the beat of Metablocks new social media analtyics dashboard for music labels, marketers and artists
• Why You Probably Don’t Want to Build an iPhone App
  Looks at some of the dynamics behind the iPhone, Facebook and other new platform “gold rushes”
• Music Sales Continue Digital Trend
  Examines digital music sales trend numbers from Nielsen/Soundscan.

Here is quick roundup of this week’s interesting widget news, trends and analysis:

• Widgetization of the Web Still Strong!
  Wall Street Journal’s “Still A Wonderful World Of Web Widgets For Some Start-Ups” concludes that widgets are still well and alive!
• Widget Builder Gydget get Acquired
  Gydget, once known for its attempts to go after the music bands, has been acquired by Adgregate, which plays to distribute its ShopAds on the 200,000 widgets that Gydget has created. Can you say, “I wish I owned my own widget”. Gydget was originally founded by Gerardo Capiel, who is now the VP of product management at MySpace.
• iWidgets Change Name to Transpond
  Company changes focus to try and power native applications for Facebook, MySpace, and iGoogle.
• Widget Traffic Numbers Continue to Grow!
  Widgets were all the rage last year and the trend seems to be growing. Widgetbox is reporting 500 million impressions in the past month (Quantcast).  RockYou, however, had 9.5 billion impressions and Clearspring had 520 million unique visitors according to comScore.

Originally from Metablocks Blog.

Here is a quick roundup of a couple of recent interesting widget news and trends:

• Mobile Widget become a Reality
  Nokia continues its push into turning its mobile phones into a widget platform as more vendors add support for its Web Runtime widgets! At the same time, Motorola is offering a $25,000 prize as part of its own mobile widget MOTODEV Challenge!
• TV Widgets are Coming
  At CES, Intel and Yahoo announce that they are revving up for the move to bring Internet widgets to TV. You can probably expect Internet widgets to make an appearance on new gaming consoles as well!
• Facebook Connect Widgets
  Since the release of Facebook Connect, entrepreneurs are building a new breed of widgets that leverage the service. Examples include commenting apps like those from Disqus and JS-Kit.
• Widget Politics
  Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Governor, is taking to widgets and social media to get the state budget passed. His “Legislature’s Failure to Act” widget features how many days the state has gone without having a budget passed. The governor has also taken his message to Twitter, with updates on the budget crisis and promoting his widget!

Yes, hopefully in a very short while you’ll be able to access widgets on your TV thanks to Intel and Yahoo! According to CNET, new TV sets from such popular electronics manufacturers like Samsung and Toshiba that feature Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100 where showcased at this years CES and will be available as early as next month!

Developed by Yahoo!’s Connected TV group, these Internet-enabled “TV Widgets” will live at the bottom of your TV screen and will be turned on or off with one click of the button! Intial widgets will include the obvious news, weather, stocks, sports and photos (Flickr).

With the help of anthropologist Genevieve Bell, director of user experience for Intel, the company has learned that most consumers want the following types of widget functionality on their TV sets:

• Something that would provide relevant information in real time, such as the weather right before heading to a sporting event.
• Something that would connect them to other people they care about, a variation of social networking.
• Something that would let them participate more with what they’re watching, for example by figuring out where a show’s cast members already had acted, or finding, rating, and sorting content.