The Indianapolis Colts, the American football team that's also building a social network, is releasing a widget today. The Colts widget is fairly impressive, and includes a photo slideshow, Colts news headlines and links to the latest videos added to Colts.com. They're also using it to promote a Superbowl tickets contest. There doesn't seem to be any promotion on the main Colts.com site, but you can grab the code from the embedded widget (below).
What's really interesting about the offering is that it's one of the first widgets we've seen deployed by Clearspring, the soon-to-launch widget creation and tracking service that appeared on Mashable back in November. If the Colts widget is anything to go by, it should be a great service - note the option to post directly to sites like MySpace, Blogger and Typepad by entering your username and password. You'll also be able to email these widgets to your friends, it seems. Clearspring will compete with Widgetbox, which just launched its own tracking service last week. Also in the social networking space, MySpace is working on its own widget platform called SpringWidgets (originally covered by Mashable when it was called TheSpringBox), while a partnership with Feedburner adds a tracking layer.
It goes without saying that widgets will be huge in 2007 - Bebo was the latest major social network to add widget support (see Bebo Widgets).
[via Pat Coyle]