Red Herring is reporting that AOL founders
Steve Case and Ted Leonsis have invested $5.5-million, as a second round investment, into
widget syndication platform Clearspring. Alex
profiled
ClearSpring back in November and other widget platforms we’ve covered
before on Read/WriteWeb include Snipperoo, Widgetbox, Fox’s SpringWidgets and MuseStorm.
In a recent post, VC Brad Feld
says there are 23 “widget management systems” and he suggests that most of them are
heading for a disappointing end. He also notes that many existing web services companies
are ‘widgetizing’ their services:
“As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget
management systems.” However, all of the companies I’ve invested
in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit,
ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services.
FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship
with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of
Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit
Search.”
Also there are the widget activities of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and indeed AOL
itself. So it’s clear that widgets are quickly becoming as common on the Web as RSS and
(in time) HTML. But it’s still early enough in the game that the likes of
ClearSpring and Snipperoo can carve out a hefty niche, much like RSS feed management a
few years ago – where Feedburner, Newsgator and a couple of others came out trumps.
Brad’s right that Feedburner has a great platform from which to supply widgets to
consumers, so they may eventually have pole position here. But I’d like to think there’s
plenty of room for ClearSpring and a couple of other widget platforms to differentiate
themselves – e.g. Feedburner’s BuzzBoost is a great
add-on widget service, but ClearSpring appears to offer a lot more functionality at
present. What do you think of the widget platforms market?
