Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders
Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into
widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex
profiled
ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we"ve covered
before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox"s SpringWidgets and MuseStorm.
In a recent post, VC Brad Feld says there are 23 "widget management systems" and he suggests that most of them are heading for a disappointing end. He also notes that many existing web services companies are "widgetizing" their services:
"As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget management systems.” However, all of the companies I’ve invested in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit, ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services. FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit Search."
Also there are the widget activities of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and indeed AOL itself. So it"s clear that widgets are quickly becoming as common on the Web as RSS and (in time) HTML. But it"s still early enough in the game that the likes of ClearSpring and Snipperoo can carve out a hefty niche, much like RSS feed management a few years ago - where Feedburner, Newsgator and a couple of others came out trumps.
Brad"s right that Feedburner has a great platform from which to supply widgets to consumers, so they may eventually have pole position here. But I"d like to think there"s plenty of room for ClearSpring and a couple of other widget platforms to differentiate themselves - e.g. Feedburner"s BuzzBoost is a great add-on widget service, but ClearSpring appears to offer a lot more functionality at present. What do you think of the widget platforms market?
>>Source Link
>>Blog: Read/WriteWeb
>>Publish Date: 3/6/2007 1:01:49 PM
>>Keywords: widget clearspring
Related Posts
>>Yahoo! Widget官方网站全新改版－－炫酷视界,用心诠释 #
作者:雅虎个人软件运营组 新版的Yahoo! Widget官方网站于2007年2月28日正式上线,诚邀各位试用体验. 纵观这次的改版,主要在以下几个方面进行了改进: 一.导航分类紧凑明晰. 针对老版网站导航栏目较分散的情况进行了改进,将Widget开发相关和用户交流的栏目进行了合并调整.调整后的导航和具体页面的内容分布更符合用户的使用习惯. 二.网站各栏目的内容进行了调整. 此
>>Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility (Michael Arrington/TechCrunch) #
Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility — The fragmentation of widget platforms presents a problem for developers, who need to develop and then maintain different versions of wi
>>Searchles releases social media’s first push-me/pull-me widget #
Searchles today released a fully integrated widget that keeps web traffic where it should be – on your site. It is the first social widget that doesn’t take the user off the source page to bookmark,
>>blinkx Launches Video Widget for Integrating Video Into Websites #
blinkx which uses speech-to-text transcription to index online video content, now has available a new widget "blinkx it" that will allow a user to embed code to display video streams in a blog or web
>>Widgetbox Releases Blidgets #
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus We covered Widgetbox, the widget market place, in June last year as well as during its DEMOfall 2006 launch. Today Widgetbox announced a new pro
>>The Ever-Changing Widget Landscape (Yahoo! Widgets Blog) #
The Ever-Changing Widget Landscape — The world of Widgets has changed a lot since Konfabulator came along back in 2003, when it was the only option of its kind for developers. Since then, sim
>>Vflyer releases classified ad widget #
Vflyer, the San Francisco start-up that lets you distribute your classified ad to multiple Web sites, tomorrow unveils a new widget service to profile the ads more easily elsewhere. The move is notabl
>>Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). (Erick Schonfeld/The Next Net) #
Will Widgets Kill the Webpage? (Exclusive Netvibes video). … Click To Play … Tariq Krim is widget crazy (watch the video above). The CEO of French startup Netvibes, the site where you
>>Mabber发布新版，向Meebo发起挑战 #
推荐： Pageflakes(飞鸽)中文版已发布，赶快来创建自已的个性化首页。 Mabber是一个网页版的IM客户端程序，上线于去年5月份左右。由于另外一个同类服务Meebo一直是处于强劲的发展势头中，与之相比Mabber显然要失色许多。不过显然Mabber也是不干示弱的，近日它就发布了一个新版本，看来是要向Meebo发起挑战了。 此次的新版本不仅重新设计了UI，而且还发布了一系列的
>>vFlyer and "The Year of the Widget" #
Online classifieds content and distribution platform vFlyer announced a new product line that could represent a shifting direction for the company. It has come out with a line of widgets that it will