This showed up in my inbox yesterday and I thought I should share it with my handful of readers.
IMPORTANT: The ability to create new Launchpad widgets will be turned off on February 1st, 2010.
Friends,As part of the ongoing process to sunset the Launchpad platform, the ability to create new widgets will be turned off on February 1st, 2010. As a reminder, here are the upcoming dates associated with this process:
* Feb. 1st, 2010: New widget creation will be disabled.
* April 5th, 2010: Launchpad console will be turned off, however existing widget installations will continue to be served.
* January 1st, 2011: Widget serving will be shut off.We are committed to working with you to make your transition process as smooth as possible, and have created a number of documents to help.
Resources
* Transition Overview
* What You Need to Know
* Questions and Answers
* Launchpad Transition Support Forum
* Launchpad & AddThis Platform Comparison
* More Information about the AddThis sharing platform
Going forward, we hope that you’ll use AddThis for your widget sharing. We think you will find AddThis to be an easy, powerful and fast.If you have any questions, please visit the Support Forum above for assistance. Thank you for your continued partnership and use of Clearspring products.
Best,
Hooman Radfar
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Clearspring Technologies
I see this as a good thing. Clearspring is consolidating their product line which will allow them to focus more on their core offerings. AddThis is immensely popular (sharing over 30 billion a month) and adds far more flexibility and options to widget developers.
The transition will be smooth. As outlined in the section above, just about anything you can do with Launchpad, you will be able to accomplish with AddThis.
Congratulations to Hooman and his team for creating such a successful product!
Related posts:
Derek, we really appreciate your support and your confidence. We’re SUPER excited about this next year and all the exciting ways that we’ll be evolving the product. If you or any of your readers have any questions about this or anything at all, feel free to e-mail me personally. – justin@clearspring.com
-Justin Thorp, Community Manager for Clearspring
I don’t see how this can be a good thing for all the developers who used ClearSprings LaunchPad to create and share widgets.
There are thousands of developers like me who are now stuck with no one to turn too – no service offers the level of functionality like LaunchPad for JS/HTML widgets – AddThis is a content sharing platform, not a widget creation platform – CS admit this on their own transition forums.
Lets be clear on this – this is marketing and acquisition affecting a fantastic technical platform that a lot of people relied on… and now it’s gone…
So no… it’s not a good thing – Clearspring completely left developers like me in the lurch with no alternatives that offer the same functionality (I don’t want to add a AddThis share button – I want to create and share JS/HTML widgets!)
The only website that comes close is WidgetBox – but even that does not have all the functionality that ClearSpring is shutting down…
Don’t be fooled…
Yeah, this is a horrible thing. Now I have to create widgets manually. Not cool, clearspring…