Which widget do you like better?

Two different widgets featuring content from the NCAA Men’s Hoops tourney. Both cool and both useful, but significantly different in their designs.

This one is from Clearspring Technologies. Gives me access to lots of content and I LOVE their “GRAB IT” feature. Makes it very easy.

We’ve learned a lot about widgets from Clearspring, who helped us launch our first Colts widget a couple of months ago. So far our little widget has been place on over 3,000 web pages earned 950,000 views. What’s really cool is it is living on and maintaining viewership even though our season is long since over and we really haven’t updated the content (since it’s an action photo widget). We’re working with Clearspring on our next one now. More on that soon.

Anyway, here’s a look at the “views” chart over the past 2 months. This is from Clearspring’s useful tracking and reporting service.

This second widget is from Springwidgets

I really like this one too, but it’s a very different execution from Clearnspring’s. This one tends to keep you interacting with the widget itself rather than sending you to Web pages for more detail. I found this very cool and very convenient.

In fact, I found it last night as I was watching the Indiana Gonzaga game and noticed that the score of the game shown on the game was keeping pace pretty well with real time. Not that I’m gonna sit and watch a widget all night, but it’s nice to know that data can be pushed to widgets that fast. I like the way you can move around the brackets and search for the team you want find. Well done!

It’s great to see companies experimenting with widgets. Seeing these examples helps me think of ways we can apply this technology to add value to our fans’ online experiences.

I’d love to hear suggestions from readers…what else could we do with widgets? Which of these exectutions do you like better??