A while back, I speculated that Feedburner would eventually look to join the widget aggregator ranks:
The new crop of widget aggregators like Widgetbox, Snipperoo, and Google Gadgets seems to be completely focused at the moment on the delivery and promotion aspects of widgets. Making it easier for folks to use widgets, and helping developers / publishers get the word out about their widgets.
This is great, but it’s only part of the puzzle – monetization and analytics are also extremely important.
So that brings me back to Feedburner. Nobody has done a better job of providing value at all steps along a blogger’s development process. They have built a distributed ad network. They have sophisticated, distributed analytics tools. They know the aggregation business.
Well, someone else has apparently been moving towards building a platform for all stages of the widget life cycle. Yesterday, Hooman Radfar announced funding for his start up Clearspring in what appears to be an attempt to apply Feedburner's model to the widget space. Says Pete Cashmore:
The quick way to describe Clearspring is “Feedburner for Widgets”, but really the service breaks down into three elements: converting your content into widget form, publishing those widgets to multiple platforms and widget galleries, and providing tools to analyze the spread of those widgets.
The only thing missing from the Feedburner formula would be the monetization piece, and I would imagine that Hooman and co. have something in the works for that as well.
And the plot thickens even more. Feedburner took a baby step towards the widget space yesterday by announcing a partnership with FIM to distribute its feeds through the SpringWidgets platform.
The stakes in the widget aggregator space are big. If someone is able to do with widgets what Google has done with ads through Google AdSsense, they will have a say in how content gets distributed in the widgified web. The primary players to date in the Web widget aggregator space are: SpringWidgets (web and desktop), Snipperoo, Google (web and desktop), Widgetbox, MuseStorm, and now Clearspring. Will Feedburner jump full throttle into the mix? Will Yahoo! and MSN launch a web widget platform to complement their desktop widget systems?
It should be a fun couple of months as things start to take shape.
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