Several of the major web 2.0 (I know, that term is so last year… or was it the year before?) blogs have someone at DEMO, where they… attend lots of demos, and blog about them. One demo that seems particularly blog-worthy was the launch of Sprout.
As Sprout CEO Carnet Rogers noted: “Techcrunch, Mashable, and RedWriteWeb posted as we launched and gave us a very kind review.” Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing for RWW, was more than merely very kind.
SproutBuilder is going to explode the world of widgets on the web. This is far and away my favorite product I’ve seen at DEMO, not just this year but ever in the three years I’ve attended.
I’ve just signed up for the beta of SproutBuilder (invites are, or were, available from the three blogs linked to from the quote above). I did build a sprout, that is, a multimedia widget. I won’t inflict it on you. One reason is that it’s a rather sorry and bedraggled sprout right now.
Another is that my attempt to plant my sprout here at WordPress.com failed. I didn’t expect to be able to plant it here, but one of the Publish options offered by Sprout was WordPress, which seemed to mean WordPress.com. And indeed, the sprout did get sent here, to be wrapped up in a draft post. But the “interesting” code was stripped out. In other words, it met the fate of most widgets at WordPress.com.
I intend to cultivate a sprout or two, post them elsewhere, and link to them from here.
Andrew, as I understand it, a widget output from SproutBuilder should be a SWF (the SproutBuilder application was written in Adobe Flex which outputs SWF applications). So to figure out how to get one onto a WordPress page, find out if there are any Flash/SWF limitations or workarounds.
IIRC, WordPress “cleans” object/embed tag code when you post. I can’t remember the exact solution, but there are some leads here:
http://wordpress.org/search/embed+a+swf+object?forums=1
Andrew,
Thanks very much for the writeup. It has been an amazing couple of hours since launch. I invite your readers to join our private beta. Here is a link.
http://sproutbuilder.com/friendsofsprout
Please help us squash to bugs and send in comments on how we can make Sprout a better product for you!
Two comments I’m particularly pleased to see – thanks, guys.
Matt, WordPress.com doesn’t just clean things, it sprays them with bleach. I haven’t tried putting the sprout in a regular WordPress blog.
Carnet, congratulations on the launch, and thanks for opening the beta invite to my hordes of readers.
Este interesant acest blog, ai putea sa-l actualizezi mai des..:)