Marshall Kirkpatrick loves Sprout:
SproutBuilder: You've Got to See This Drag and Drop Widget Maker
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.
Techcrunch is also enthusiastic:
Sprout is marketing its release as a better way for designers to create distributable widgets. The company has partnered up with Clearspring, Gigya, and SpringWidgets to provide both easy distribution and tracking/analytics. Sprout creators can track the usage of not only entire sprouts but the elements, such as buttons, within those sprouts. They can also use the application to make changes to sprouts that have already been distributed across the web. While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.
If you move fast you can get an account at Read/WriteWeb or TechCrunch. I've given it a quick test run. It's very lovely, but a bit confusing. Here's my widget:
(Notice something strange about it? I entered the Snipperoo Feedburner url http://feeds.feedburner.com/Snipperoo but the widget contains Techcrunch UK's feed - wtf?)
We noticed the bug late last night and working on a fix. I think we know what the problem is. Sorry about that. Keep reporting those bugs so we can squash them!
Posted by: carnet | January 30, 2008 at 04:13 PM