Revisiting Clearspring

I may have to take back some of my initial impressions about Clearspring and other widget services.

When I first started considering the idea three or four years ago, I think I was bothered by the notion that widgets were shaping up to become an industry. I didn’t think they needed to be weighted down with monetization or tech industry hype. Because of their nature as part of a web page, widgets didn’t deserve to flower into a tech sub-sector any more than, say, an “About us” page, or a copyright footer. I believed that any site using a decent flexible CMS and employing halfway creative developers could make widgets on their own.

I still believe that, but in visiting the Clearspring site for the first time in more than a year, and plopping my newest widget into the tool, I’m seeing the value. It’s in their distribution channel, and the slick, easy way an organization or individual can share a widget across social platforms.

So, now I’m forced to moderate my opinion, and it’s still percolating. I’m still not sure if a big site—think about a big media property—should put the widget platform’s version of a widget on its own site, or if it should just offer a sharable version of it in widget directories.

I’ll be digging into it more; I want to look at the API and all of the other goodies I skipped over in my short tramp through the site this morning.

Just one criticism for now: for this particular widget that doesn’t need to take up a lot of vertical space, I didn’t like the requirement to make it at least 236px tall. I had to make a separate version of the search box HTML to accommodate the extra height, and I always hate having to remember to change multiple versions of things when you just want to make a little tweak. It could be I’m missing something. Let me know.

Here’s how it looks on my Netvibes page.