TheSpringBox MySpace RSS Reader – A Review

TheSpringBox is the mysterious widget site owned by Fox Interactive Media that some speculate may be being positioned as the sole widget provider to MySpace.  Currently, the site offers a download that lets you run widgets on your desktop, as well as a Flash-based RSS reader widget.

The Flash-based RSS reader widget is sort of a big deal, as up until this point, getting a feed reader that worked on MySpace was a frustrating process.  While some services have tried to offer this functionality (Nooz, Rhapsody), I had never been able to get them to work – and believe me, I tried.  There were image based workarounds that sort of worked, but were not exactly user friendly.

**Note, I just tried Rhapsody's MySpace RSS reader again, and it worked.**

The RSS widget reader allows users to plug in a feed url, and it generates a snippet of code that can placed on any site accepting Flash embeds, including of course, MySpace.  You don’t have to register to configure this widget.

TheSpringBox offers a couple of other content based widgets such as a clock and a weather forecast widget, but for now I’m just going to focus on the RSS reader.

Applications & Opportunity

The absence of an easy to use and configure RSS reader that worked on MySpace had been a glaring hole on the widget landscape.  I would guess that of MySpace’s 100M+ user base, there are a significant number of folks who have blogs on other sites.  These people now have a way to consolidate their content on their MySpace profile page.

Beyond the personal blogs, the thousands of businesses that have set up MySpace profiles now have a way to feed their fresh content directly to their profile.  A widgetized RSS reader will be a helpful way for these businesses to keep their MySpace profile page fresh with their corporate talking points.  Write once, publish many is a heck of a lot easier than write many, publish many.

The million dollar question, I think, is whether businesses will be willing to pay for an RSS widget for their MySpace profile, given that TheSpringBox option is the only game in town.  By artificially controlling the market for these sorts of widgets, Fox Interactive Media may be able to squeeze a few more dollars from these freeloading, corporate profiles.

To sum things up, this is an extremely useful widget with potentially huge adoption.  Whether Fox Interactive plans to try and keep (make?) TheSpringBox as the only working RSS reader for MySpace remains to be seen.

Configuration

At the moment, this is a bare bones widget.

Clicking the “Widgetize” tab will take you to a form that asks for your feed’s URL, and allows you to set the width and height of the widget.  Clicking “apply” generates a preview of the RSS reader, and a snippet of code that you can paste into your blog or MySpace profile.

Currently, there are no design customization options.  That being said, it’s not a bad looking RSS reader, and certainly is better than any of the alternatives on the market in terms of widgets that work with MySpace.

Testing

Not surprisingly, given that TheSpringBox is owned by Fox Interactive Media, the widget works fine on MySpace.  For a good example, check out Mashable’s MySpace page.  Pete has gone the extra mile of adding his own code snippet to allow others to put Mashable news on their MySpace profiles.

Pete’s hacking of this widget brings up an interesting point – in its current incarnation, this widget has zero branding, and zero viral features.  You have to go into the code itself to figure out that TheSpringBox is the service that hosts this widget.  There is a “menu” tab, but it is grayed out.  There is a downward facing arrow that will take you to TheSpringBox, but there is no way for the user to know that without trying it out.

Editorial

While most start-ups bend over backwards to the viral part right at launch, it would appear to be an afterthought for TheSpringBox.  Clearly, TheSpringBox’s status as a Fox Interactive company makes their challenges a bit different than those of the average start-up.

I haven’t talked much about the download component of TheSpringBox.  If you visit the site, they are clearly focused on the download.  The benefits of downloading the desktop version are pitched aggressively throughout the site, and they make you click a few times to get to the MySpace widget.

So why is the download so important?  Fred Wilson calls the MySpace music widget the gold standard of the widget world because you can click once and add any song that you stumble across to your profile page.  It seems to me that the primary value of the download is something similar – once you’ve downloaded the software, you can click on any TheSpringBox widget and add it to your desktop (and MySpace profile?) with just one click.

Obviously, driving enough downloads to make this meaningful would be a monumental task for most start-ups.  But for one that is owned by Fox Interactive?  My sense is that they can push just about anything they want – especially if there is a clear value to their user base.  And clicking once to add a widget as opposed to navigating back and forth between edge feeder and MySpace would seem to be pretty valuable.

As interesting and useful as TheSpringBox’s RSS reader widget is, it would seem to be just the tip of the iceberg.  The real story that should be watched is how successful Fox Interactive is in driving downloads, and using its might to make TheSpringBox the default widget platform for all of MySpace.

Comments

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A link to the widget would have been useful

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