The media giants are embracing social media in a big way. First we have CBS buying Last.FM, and today we have widget platform Clearspring announching a partnership with NBC to deliver, manage, distribute, and track the network's widgets.
Alex Iskold has a fantastic summary of the announcement over at Read/WriteWeb with the details.
The only thing that I'd like to add to Alex's coverage is the role that Clearspring's scale had in landing NBC. As far as I can tell, Clearspring has raised more money ($7.5M) and served more widgets than any of the other widget platforms.
Clearspring cut their teeth working with RockYou's hugely popular widget and have proven that they can handle massive traffic. According to Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar, the company already has three major data centers (in Atlanta, California, and Europe) and continues to invest heavily in infrastructure.
In the widget business, speed can be a killer. If your widget is slowing down the host site, you will most likely get ripped out. For the widget platforms, being able to guarantee fast loading widgets - or more specifically, that your servers won't be the bottleneck - is a hugely important factor, and one that requires big funding.
There's no doubt that NBC took these factors into account.
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