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Longevity of the platform and commitment!
Hi
I'm a developer of widgets (I have designed about 40) and have been using the Clearspring platform for about 3 years. Clearspring have just announced they are terminating all widget support and the entire platform in approx 2 months time, leaving hundreds of us in a bit of trouble! They are replacing Launchpad with the simple share button AddThis, which is utterly useless if you are designing widgets!
I have 2 questions for you.
The first is very simple - Clearspring told us they were committed to widgets but then just decided to pull the plug on us - leaving many of us with hundreds of hours of work to do. Is there any basic commitment you provide with the PRO solution - ie. you're not going anywhere are you! If I start designing with your platform, you will still be there in a few years time!! I know this is a hypothetical question but for obvious reasons I feel a little wary of the 'we will host your business' approach!
The second is - is there a way to host the widgets on my servers or does everything have to be hosted on Widgetbox - I know the html url is my side but what about the platform itself - is this possible? To have everything on my side, still paying you obviously!! This would help our clients who are more than concerned at the moment - we are having to inform thousands of people to change their blogs, pages etc and the last thing we want to do is do this again!
Hope all this makes sense - the platform looks good as far as I have seen so far,
Cheers
Rob
I'm a developer of widgets (I have designed about 40) and have been using the Clearspring platform for about 3 years. Clearspring have just announced they are terminating all widget support and the entire platform in approx 2 months time, leaving hundreds of us in a bit of trouble! They are replacing Launchpad with the simple share button AddThis, which is utterly useless if you are designing widgets!
I have 2 questions for you.
The first is very simple - Clearspring told us they were committed to widgets but then just decided to pull the plug on us - leaving many of us with hundreds of hours of work to do. Is there any basic commitment you provide with the PRO solution - ie. you're not going anywhere are you! If I start designing with your platform, you will still be there in a few years time!! I know this is a hypothetical question but for obvious reasons I feel a little wary of the 'we will host your business' approach!
The second is - is there a way to host the widgets on my servers or does everything have to be hosted on Widgetbox - I know the html url is my side but what about the platform itself - is this possible? To have everything on my side, still paying you obviously!! This would help our clients who are more than concerned at the moment - we are having to inform thousands of people to change their blogs, pages etc and the last thing we want to do is do this again!
Hope all this makes sense - the platform looks good as far as I have seen so far,
Cheers
Rob
I’m undecided
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Inappropriate?Hi Rob,
Thanks for reaching out. I heard about the decision to discontinue Launchpad. The transition should be fairly painless for those that want to come over, but it's still a major inconvenience for those developers that have invested in the platform.
I'm not sure what kind of guarantee I can give, but widgets, the runtime, and the gallery have been our business from day 1. Everything else that we build and pursue is based off of this. We were the first ones out there, and we have no plans of that changing any time soon. Products have come and gone in the last 3 years, but I can honestly say that the backbone (gallery, runtime, metrics, etc.) have continued to grow regardless of any other priorities.
As for your second question, you do not have to host your content with us. When making a widget, you have a couple of options:
HTML/JS - Hosted content (http://www.widgetbox.com/make/html)
Remote - Remote content (http://www.widgetbox.com/make/remote)
Flash - Remote Flash file (http://www.widgetbox.com/make/flash)
You can find some basics about Remote widgets here:
http://docs.widgetbox.com/developers/...
I'll be interested to hear any feedback, comments, suggestions, or gripes you may have if you go through with the transition. I'm sure that there are a handful of other developers out there that would also find this information useful.
Lastly, because I'm not sure what Clearspring's policy was recently, please go into all of this knowing that basic widgets are powered by ads.
You can find me here if you have any questions.
Dave
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Inappropriate?Hi Dave
Well top marks for speed of reply!! Appreciated..
I'll probably sign up to the top pro widgets straight away - they don't have ads right? I work alongside some of the biggest bands in the world and they won't want ads I can assure you of that!
Thanks for the answers - all makes sense.
As for my second question, I meant that the final url of the widget (to share) would be www.mysite.co.uk/widget as opposed to www.widgetbox.com/23e3dd-34hjr88-ded383d - if you see what I mean!
Anyway - plenty of reading for me!!
Cheers
Rob
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?and those links were not to be live, just text examples!!
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Inappropriate?Ahh, I see. So you'd want a page on your site where the widget is distributed from instead of using our 'details page' (that's how we refer to it).
Before I go that route, I'd suggest starting out with the cheaper of the plans off the bat, if the only function you need is to not display ads. Yeah, obviously I'm not a sales guy, but the last thing I want to see is you paying more than you should for what you need. If those other features (FB Fan page apps, more Pro credits for making template widgets, or the HTML Wrapper) are appealing, then don't let me stop you! The one that I'd expect to be the most useful for someone generating widgets for clients would be the HTML Wrapper. I believe Clearspring had a comparable product.
Anyhow, back to the details page question. Here's one possibly option:
http://docs.widgetbox.com/developers/...
What the viral installer allows you to do is to collect the configuration using a form that you build (on your site), then pass that config to the installer, which will then open a menu and create an 'instance' of the widget for the user. The primary difference between this and the interaction that you'd see on a details page is that the widget preview that you'd render on the page will not update as they fill out the form.
Would this meet your requirement? If not, just let me know what your specific use-case is, and what your expectations would be. Then we can work our way out from there.
We do have a more customizable offering in Business Pro for trusted partners, let's leave that option off the table until we know that we need it.
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Inappropriate?Hi Rob,
I just wanted to check in here. As you were one of the first Launchpad users that I had a chance to interact with, I'd love to touch base with you via phone or email about what your impressions were, key differences, and any other info that we can find out to be useful to any future Launchpad users that are looking for an alternative.
If you're willing to help, shoot me an email at support (at) widgetbox.com and mention my name.
All the best,
Dave
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Inappropriate?Hey Dave
Cheers for the email, been away for a day or so!
Still checking it all out and today created my first widget here (based on the original html code from a clearspring widget) - and it was very easy and impressive!
I'm going to need to develop the FB apps too so I guess I will have to sign up pretty quickly, as Clearspring have only given us another 50 days before they start deleting everything.
I'm based in london so email will probably be the best way of communicating, and cheapest, I presume you are in the states!
The one thing that I would want from Widgetbox that Cleapsring has - the ability to transform my widget into an iGoogle gadget. Most of our traffic came from iGoogle, it was very good. I would love it if we could do the same with Widgetbox???
Also we used Netvibes a lot but that was nothing compared to iGoogle. Facebook apps are great too - I have about 12 FB pages with apps on and can hopefully transfer them easily too....
Will let you know more when I come across stuff!
Rob
I’m confident
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Inappropriate?Hey Rob,
Thanks for the reply. For the email bit, would you mind shooting me an email at support@widgetbox.com? I can't get your email address from here, unfortunately. I have someone here that would like to go over some of this stuff with you, as she'll be writing it all up.
The iGoogle gallery submission stuff is not currently supported. It's certainly a fair request, but in the meantime, you can get around this by using one of our code snippets and building your own XML for submission to Google.
I'll certainly be curious to see how the FB apps transfer over. Our implementation is a bit different from Clearsprings. I believe they used a method similar to our original approach, which we were forced to scrap sometime back when Facebook made some platform changes.
Anyhow, looking forward to speaking with you via email. Thanks again for the great info.
Cheers,
Dave
