Sexy Widget

Breaking: Clearspring acquires AddThis

Widget infrastructure provider Clearspring has acquired bookmarking and distribution tool / button AddThis.

According to Quantcast, the AddThis (destination site?) is reaching about 1.5M people per month, and according to their site, their button was served 20 billion (!) times this month via partners that include TechCrunch, Zappos, and CBS.

The AddThis acquisition gives Clearspring a much stronger position in decoupled distribution tools to complement its already strong widget wrapper / analytics package.  In the world of distributed widget infrastructure / plumbing, it's starting to look like a two horse race - Gigya and Clearspring.

For more, see ReadWriteWeb.

Widgetbox: Network Effects, Selfish Interest, and Hub & Spoke

I’ve been following Widgetbox for a while now, and from the get go, they’ve had a slightly different approach than some of the other widget infrastructure providers.

The biggest difference has been in their emphasis on a central hub to power widget distribution. While companies like ClearSpring and Gigya have made their living at the edge, Widgetbox has stubbornly continued to invest in their widget gallery at Widgetbox.com.

This strategy has not been without its costs. Gigya and Clearspring have been able to achieve wider reach than Widgetbox has by focusing on widget distribution “in the wild” as opposed to via a central gallery.

But as I have stated repeatedly on this blog, a robust destination site to complement an edge presence is an important asset. A destination site provides landing pages for organic search traffic, typically generates higher CPMs, and offers a more branded experience for the user.

With the launch of its Blog Network last week, Widgetbox is putting its destination site into play in a big way. On paper, this is a text book hub & spoke play – a central destination site working in tandem with a distributed presence in an attempt to achieve the network effect.

Here’s how it works:

- Bloggers submit their blog to one of 29 categories on the Widgetbox network and embed the corresponding widget code on their blog

- Widgetbox crawls each blog to ensure that the widget code has been embedded

- Local leaderboards on each Widgetbox.com channel display top blogs and a river of recent posts from that category, and the network widget displays top posts from that category

So let’s break this down:

Widgetbox’s destination site does about 800K uniques per month. They already have a significant blogger outreach presence via their “Blidget” product – a tool that converts RSS feeds into embeddable Flash widgets.

In order to try and generate a network effect, they have associated a “selfish interest” with the action of embedding a Widgetbox network widget. Those bloggers who embed the widget will receive click through traffic from both the network landing page (via the recent post river and the top blog leaderboard) as well as from the edge (other blogs that embed the network widget). The more bloggers participate, the bigger the network, the better the network landing page on Widgetbox.com, and the more clicks that get distributed out.

This isn’t a new idea – now defunct startup Spotplex tried something similar a while back (you can read my review here).

But Widgetbox is not Spotplex. They have a solid blogger base to work with, they have a bigger brand, and they have a much bigger foundation of destination site traffic to mete out to participating blogs.

I’m bullish on the idea, as it incorporates some of my favorite things; tapping into selfish interest, local leaderboards, rivers of content, and destination site and edge working together. Here's a screenshot of one of their network landing pages.

RateItAll Funding

My company, RateItAll, has raised a bit more funding and announced a Board Member. VentureBeat has the scoop here, and here's the full release.

Lifestreaming Panel: A Recap

I made the trek down to Stanford tonight to catch the VLAB Lifestreaming Panel. My trip was an epic fail - a 19 minute wait for a Bart train, followed by a jam packed Cal-Train, followed by a Stanford University bus driver who had never heard of the Stanford Business School.

I arrived 15 minutes late, did not get a seat, and as such, was just not able to get into comfortable blogging position.

I do have some reactions though. First, here’s the background:

The panel was made up Leah Culver (Pownce), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Loic Le Meur (Seesmic), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC). The moderator was Kara Swisher from AllThingsD.

I was there to hear what Bret Taylor had to say. Whenever I start to think hard about what I see the defining trends of this mini era of the web; feeds, rivers of content, ambient awareness, and cross domain features, I get back to…. FriendFeed. The aggregation layer that sits on top. The service that can achieve an impossible level of activity (100M entries!) without even need to build its own community….while paradoxically, being able to build its own community on top of the activity streams of other services.

So I was really interested in what Bret had to say. Here were the things that stood out:

FriendFeed’s traffic pattern was an initial burst driven by some early press coverage, immediately followed by months of flatness (and soul searching by the founders). It wasn’t until a few things happened that FriendFeed saw its traffic start to blow up:

- They released an API
- They made the site stable and lighting fast
- They started to make users out of (and get favorable coverage from) the social media / tech press

Bret also talked pretty eloquently about the fragmentation of web services (what I call cross domain features), and how it doesn’t make sense for any one service to try and do everything. And how this phenomenon opens the door for lots of specialized services to do one or a few things really, really well. Flickr should not build IM, and Google Talk should not try and recreate Flickr. This vision, of course, fits nicely into the need for a service like FriendFeed to aggregate all of these activity streams into a single river.

Finally, Bret stated explicitly that ads need to be in the river of content, and not relegated to the sidebar. I could not agree more.

A couple of other observations:

Loic Le Meur has confidence, charm, and charisma to spare. He probably could have been up there pitching a 1996 Yahoo! style directory and been well received. However, I’m not completely sold on video comments because there’s no way to scan them. With a written blog comment, you can scan your way right past the 8 out of 10 that suck on say TechCrunch. No way to do that with video.

I thought Leah Culver mailed in the Pownce demo a bit, but I liked her backbone on the panel. When Kara Swisher kept trying to get the panelists to admit that there would only be one or three winners and every other company would go under, it was Leah that got visibly pissed and quite logically pointed to the diversity of the web as a whole, the low cost of building software, and how ridiculous it is to suggest that an entrepreneur should despair that the odds are against them.

In terms of the moderation, I would have liked to see more questions about things like privacy, granular control of what’s included in your lifestream, the effort each big SNS is making to keep the lifestream within their respective walled gardens, best practices in journaling related items, the algorithms behind showing what’s relevant, patterns in how folks are consuming rivers of content, and so forth. I thought there was way, way, WAY too much emphasis on business models and exits and stuff.

Whether it be lifestreaming or consuming content in a river format – this stuff is pretty exciting. From where I’m standing, this format has the potential to replace the search box as the primary way folks consume content online. I found the moderator’s obsession with bringing the conversation back to revenue models, consolidation, and exits to be completely inappropriate premature.

For a more in depth look at Bret's presentation, check out Louis Gray's write-up.

Reviews of the TechCrunch 50

There looks to be a couple hundred ratings that have already come in on the 52 companies of TechCruch50. Click through here if you want to rate them rapid fire (you'll have to register).

Check out RateItAll

Adgregate Markets: In Widget Credit Card Submission

Distributed commerce is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Previously on this blog, I’ve covered companies like ThisNext, CartFly, Zazzle, Kaboodle, MPire, and Edgeio and their various forays into allowing commerce to take place at the edge via widgets.

Of this group of companies, only the now defunct Edgeio went all in and allowed actual in widget credit card submission – the rest of these companies take you right up to the purchase point in widget, but then drive you back to home base to execute the transaction.

At the TC50 event, startup Adgregate Markets took the torch from Edgeio by showing off its new commerce widget that allows buyers to execute the transaction within the widget.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I love full featured widgets – we really have come along way from the Last.FM .jpg widget that took a literal snapshot of your listening history chart.

But at the same time, there are all kinds of security issues involved in allowing in widget credit card submission.

For example, let’s say the Adgregate Markets shopping widget and its related affiliate program takes off and becomes a staple on popular blogs. People start to get used to seeing it, and start to trust it.

What’s to stop somebody from mimicking the look and feel of the widget, putting this phishing widget on a blog, and collecting credit card info? Without a trusted, accountable URL associated with the widget, I won’t be entering my credit card info any time soon.

Here’s an example of the Adgregate Markets widget (I promise, it’s the real one and not something I hacked together to phish for credit card numbers).

For more on the security risks associated with in widget credit card submission, check out Sasha's post on the Redfin blog.