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?
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)