ClearSpring Dumps Widgets for Ad Revenue March 5, 2010
Posted by ActiveEngine Sensei in ActiveEngine.trackback
If you’ve frequented this blog you’ll have noted that Sensei likes to pick a theme song to add to the bombast of his message. The cool little boxes that you can click and play a tune are widgets made by ClearSpring, and GrooveShark – the free music service – and you used to be able to include them in your posts directly with WordPress.
Well nothing lasts forever and ClearSpring is dumping their widget platform entirely in order to focus on Ad Revenue. “Deprecate” is the polite term. Oh, and its replacement will only be visible in WordPress’s side bar.
This will not turn into a rant, as other developers are screaming about this. Rather, Sensei thinks he’ll have a neat work around that he’ll tell you about real soon. It promises to be cool, easy to use with WordPress, and employ some really good technology that Sensei has talked about in previous posts. Yep. It will be forged in the ActiveEngine and hopefully be of use to WordPress.com bloggers.
With a bit of nostalgia, here’s a widget. Play it and rock.
Editor’s note: As of 1/1/2011 the ClearSpring Widgets no longer display. Workaround is pending.
ActiveEngine 
Hi dude, my name is Justin Thorp. I’m the Community Manager for Clearspring Technologies. Thanks for your use of widgets build on our platform Launchpad.
Stumbled upon your post and just wanted to clarify a few things. We still very much love widgets and think they’re appropriate part of someone social media strategy.
It’s just that we’ve moved our support for widgets into our AddThis platform and are working with all of our publishers to help them with the transition. If you have any questions or would like to talk about, I’d be happy to. Feel free to drop me an e-mail – justin@clearspring.com
Justin, thanks for contacting me. I’ve been trying to figure out whose tree to shake first. I mean this in a good way, as I love having the Widgets in posts. Not sure if this is an issue for WordPress to create a short like they did for the original widgets or for GrooveShark to clarify their intent with the AddThis with WordPress.
In the end, I really like the small widget format in the post. While I’m happy to give shout outs to great services like Clearspring, GrooveShark and others, I think the side bar is the spot to do that, but in a post I think theme warrants just a small widget with a single song.
The big question is, what format will WordPress support from Clearsping, and what will become of the older widgets that are currently running? It may be more effective to exchange emails, so I’ll forward these comments to you at your Clearspring address.
Thanks again for contacting me.