This is one great week for widgets. RockYou received a hefty round of funding yesterday, and today marks a dually beneficial partnership between white label network solutions company KickApps and widget maker and distributor Clearspring. This partnership is especially focused on the marketing potential of joining forces, as it provides a full-circle approach to widget advertising.
The result is a platform on which to internally create and distribute distribute Clearspring widgets, and a KickApps' directive within Clearspring's platform as well. On Clearspring, you'll find a KickApps WYSIWYG creation studio along with management tools, and on KickApps you'll find one-click distribution for Clearspring widgets, along with tracking and analysis. So when you're creating a network on KickApps or a widget on Clearspring, you can do so with either service in mind.
What's happening is a combination of widgets and social networks, which pushes widgets as a fully integrated advertising solution, as well as a channel for content distribution. Such a piecemeal approach has been in development for some time, especially as experimentation with widgets and their potential for advertising has emerged these past couple of years, and open platforms enable a highly integrated approach for third party integration and the insertion of accessible content and ads.