Clearspring Modularizes - Goes after Gigya

Few have written as eloquently as Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar about the modularization and fragmentation of web content (see here, here, and here).  Hooman’s vision for how things would play out led him to found Clearspring, based on the belief that companies would need help widgetizing, distributing, and tracking their content in this fragmented environment.

Ironically, to date, Clearspring’s widget platform has not itself been modularized.  Part of the reason for this is that Clearspring cut its teeth working with giant media companies such as the NBA, who were looking for a widget service provider that could provide a turnkey solution that encompassed everything – widget hosting and delivery, distribution, and analytics.  While Clearspring’s end to end solution proved to be a great advantage in signing up big media companies, which in turn has propelled it to extraordinary scale, it was less effective in reaching the developer community. 

With the release of Launchpad, Clearspring has begun the process of decoupling its tools from each other, allowing developers to go in on a self serve basis and grab what they need from Clearspring’s suite of products.  Specifically, publishers are now able to add skinnable one click add buttons and for all of their widgetized content, on their site, in minutes.  You also get access to Clearspring’s sophisticated analytics tools.

Those that follow this space closely might be thinking that sounds very much like what Gigya is doing. 

I concur.  I don’t think it would be a stretch to gauge the intent of this release as that of “Gigya Killer.”

As a publisher, I’ve always admired Clearspring’s sleek distribution and analytics tools.  However, because widget distribution from my site has always been important, I never could justify investing the time to plug our widgets into the Clearspring platform without being able to use the same distribution tools from our destination site.  Now that I can plug Clearspring’s platform into our widgets (a subtle but important difference), it’s much easier to see how my company might work with them.

For more coverage, see Mashable.  Click through to try out Clearspring Launchpad yourself.