Share it or I’ll bang your heads together!
made this daft Christmas countdown timer last year thought I’d better get with the times and add some embeddable goodness courtesy of Gigya. This allows you to take it and put it on your site with only a few clicks. The ‘Gigya-iastion’ process is very simple, create your flash movie, pass it through the Gigya site and it spits out an embed tag at the end. Paste it into your blog (like I did below) and hey presto, a little tab appears (bottom right) allowing you to post it to all sorts of social networks and blogging sites. ClearSpring also provide a similar service. Both provide tracking. Both allow non-commercial applications to use it for free. However, both don’t allow for different languages and both don’t acknowledge local social networks. It’s just the biggies for now.
Give it a try now, it won’t bite. You don’t have to have a blog to see how it works!
Google and various other ad technology providers also provide sharable ads. The idea being then ads are created more as ‘content’ and therefore have a value to their target audience. Said audience can then choose to shere the ‘content’ on their own site. In reality, the ‘ad’ has to be an ad FOR the embeddable content, so in the end, the thing you were advertising in the first place tends to bet pushed to the back of the queue. Still, the principle is there. Check out Google’s Gadget Ads or Pointroll’s (Clearspring enabled) Widget Ads.
Of course, it should go without saying that it’s good practice to make content embeddable whenever possible. However, it can all seem a bit overwhelming sometimes. There is a simple way though. Visit AddThis, create a free account, choose you button style and it too generates a small bit of code. Simply paste it into your page and it allows the page link to be posted to all kinds of blogs. Bit crude but it works… like so…
This one opens a selection window…
This one is even cuter with a dropdown panel…
Now there’s no excuse for not sharing! Oh how my junior school teacher would be proud to hear me say that!
July 28th, 2008 at 2:09 am
Hi, my name is Justin Thorp and I’m the Developer Community Manager at Clearspring. (http://clearspring.com) I was just curious about what made you ultimately go to Gigya. If you have any questions or thoughts about Clearspring, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
July 28th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Hi Justin,
Thanks for your comment. I investigated Clearspring and Gigya at the same time (for a big Disney project). The Disney team in the US have subsequently signed a deal with you, so that’s all good! Don’t worry, we love Clearspring!
So why did I post a Gigya test? I’m also involved in an IP business (character creation etc.) called Digital Outlook Studios. The idea is to launch new IP online and generate interest to the point where we can attract either sponsors, development deals or anything in between. VivaVoodoo was our first.
We recently teamed up with Aardman Animations to create Jellybeats and needed a widget. Because this was a fledgling project with no commercial history, we were aware that using Clearspring may incur costs, something we couldn’t justify at this early stage. Gigya was free so it took away the uncertainty. I guess the issue was that widgets are so fickle, regardless of the brand (ask the BBC that one). You may have a monster hit or a complete failure and often it’s a very thin line. So doing something for free and seeing how it goes is an attractive and prudent strategy. Technically I think we qualified as ‘commercial’, hence we went with Gigya for that one.
I did actually investigate (and make a Clearspring version of my test widget) first as we’d noticed you guys from an X-men widget, which was a real Eureka moment. It’s still a flip-a-coin thing but money is a factor. You give the benefits that money buys. If you haven’t got momey, Gigya runs a close second for most.
Does that make sense? Super happy to be corrected if I’ve got something a bit wonky.