If you read my initial review of Sprout, you probably noticed how messy my first stab at creating a widget with the service was. To address that issue, Sprout has released a variety of pre-made templates for building widgets (or “Sprouts” as they like to call them). In the sample widget below, I’ve used the “personal Sprout” template and added a custom tab for my Twitter feed, but there are also templates for sports, politics, and causes. The templates are a great starting point for the design-impaired like myself, as once you have the template built, the learning curve for the rest of the tool is fairly minimal, especially if you're familiar with image editing tools like Photoshop. Additionally, Sprout plans to allow designers to create their own templates that can be used by others.
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In addition to the templates, Sprout has added several new components that can be added to your Sprouts, most notably integration with PollDaddy so you can include polls and surveys. In coming weeks, Sprout plans to launch components for Twitter, Seesmic, Ribbit, Dapper, and others. Along those lines, Sprout is planning to launch an SDK next month at the Web 2.0 Expo so that more third-party services can integrate into Sprout and offer their features to users. According to Carnet Williams, CEO of Sprout, their SDK won’t be completely open at first - it will be more like that offered by Meebo in that they’ll be closely working with the partners they bring in to build components.
While so far Sprout has been mostly described as a widget creation tool (and they’ve added more features to support that usage, such as the ability to publish a widget to Google Gadgets), the company is quick to point out that they envision their tool being used for far more, including the creation of entire web pages. Williams pointed me to this example of how The University of Oregon is using Sprout to power an entire web page. On the whole, Sprouts created by users during the beta period received approximately 12 million views.