We’re happy to announce we’ve upgraded the Sprout platform once again. You should notice some performance improvements that stem from having turned on asynchronous calls, as well as improvements to the user-interface for the slideshow and Jukebox components. Finally, and this is a biggie, we’ve integrated YouTube’s new AS3 library into our video component. As always, if you’d like to learn more about the release, visit the release notes page.

Thanks and keep on sprouting!

If you look at the articles in our support section, you’ll see that we have embedded Get Satisfaction widgets.  These widgets provide our users with a direct line to our support team and the Sprout: Get Satisfaction community. Whenever you see a widget that looks like this, feel free to fill it out and connect with us!

You can also use our Get Satisfaction company page to browse popular ideas, questions and see what other users have asked.  This is a great resource to see if someone else has the same concern or feedback that you have.  If it already exists, you can vote on that item to raise its importance. (see image below)

As always, we truly value your feedback and look forward to the on-going conversation around our products.

Jing is a lot like Twitter at first: when you try it you might think, “Interesting, but when would I ever use it?” Then you start playing around with it, see how others are using it and you’re hooked.

This is a guest blog post by Michael Britt, host of The Psych Files podcast.

Essentially, Jing allows you to take a quick (5 minute max) screen capture (still or video) of whatever you’re doing on your computer. If you take a video screencast you can:

• save the video to your computer as a .swf or .mp4 file (.mp4 is only available if you have a Jing Pro account),
• save the video to Jing’s servers (Jing is owned by TechSmith, the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia). Jing will send you a URL to the video which you can share however you like, or
• send the video to your YouTube account.

If you’re having a problem doing something with a program on your computer for example, you could take a quick Jing video and then when Jing sends you the URL (takes about 2-3 minutes), you email/IM the link to someone who can see exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s how you might use Jing with your Sprout: in my previous post I showed how a teacher could use a Sprout to handle all those annoying writing errors (like confusing “then” and “than”) which crop up every year in students’ papers. A teacher could create a Sprout with buttons for each typical writing error, and then link the buttons to a page that contains written examples of how to write properly or links to YouTube videos in which someone else explains how to avoid the writing error.

You could also use Jing to explain things to your students yourself and then embed that video into your Sprout.

To embed a Jing video into a Sprout, get yourself a free Jing account and play around with Jing. Make a video and either:

• save the video to your YouTube account, or
• save your Jing videos to your computer in .swf format.

In your Sprout, open Assets, click “Add Assets” and then upload the .swf from your computer. At that point you can just drag the Jing .swf file to your Sprout or just click the green plus sign below the Jing file and it will be added to your open Sprout.

Couple of things to note:

• When you make your Jing video you’ll probably want to make it small. Hold down the shift key when you’re determining the size of your Jing video and you’ll get some options you’ll probably want to use.
• The Jing video will play find, but it will use its own controls in your Sprout – it won’t work within the Sprout video component unless you upload it to YouTube and embed it from the YouTube URL.

Give it a try. Here’s a quick  video that shows how I combined Sprouts with Jings:

Works great.

- Michael Britt

The rush to create engaging Facebook fan pages is on, and we’re thrilled to leverage our platform to bring great brands to Facebook. Moving forward we’ll be showcasing some of the best fan page examples through our blog to get you inspired. For example, the band 311 just launched a new fan page to showcase their new album entitled Uplifter. Check it out and take a moment to listen to the entire album through the Sprout. We’re also happy to see REI’s page that features the latest deals from the REI outlet.

And, you can always see our latest examples in our Facebook fan page gallery.

In our conversation, Walter describes what the workflow looks like with Sprout as a key component of the process. In his example, he talks about a project with MySpace around a particular band’s music video premiere that needed some custom Flash elements. One of these elements was a slideshow with a countdown clock. This element previously took about one hour to code by hand but Walter was able to create this in 15 minutes using Sprout. The client received the final product and was very happy.  Here is the sprout that was created (the countdown is expired since the date has already passed):

“If I had done that straight-up in Flash, it would have taken me an hour or so, but with Sprout, it only took about 15 minutes once I had my assets ready.  What makes it even cooler, is that I am able to get really great reporting on my sprouts.” - Walter Gross

Here is the entire interview:

Sprout’s video player has been upgraded to better support YouTube videos by integrating their newly released AS3 Chromeless player.

Improvements include better playback quality and reliability. You’ll also notice there is now a YouTube logo which appears in the bottom right corner of the player (as it is does in all YouTube videos). In addition, the YouTube play button will appear in the center of the poster-frame image before the video starts playing, rather than our custom play button. When you pause, however, you’ll see our custom button.

There is one minor issue that we’ll be trying to resolve shortly involving the poster-frame. Currently, the poster frame is not showing up and the first image in the player is simply black. Also, when paused the image will be black. We’re working with YouTube to resolve this issue.

Before reaching out to Sprout, Webber Shandwick had already used Sprout Builder to create an awareness widget to promote their product launch. Because they’d had success with their own effort, they decided to get in touch to see how else Sprout might be able to help. That’s when we popped open a can of our Sprout Engage to create a Facebook application that would get their community engaged.

Here’s the widget that Weber Shandwick created on their own:

Sprout tapped into the vibe of the project by creating a Facebook application that allowed users to throwback their look by importing a portrait of themselves, or taking one with their web cam, and placing it into a customizable retro template.

The overall campaign was so successful for Pepsi that they are relaunching in December! Keep your eyes open for that and in the meantime you can learn more by reading the entire case study.

Through an initiative called, Huffington Post: Impact, social media fundraising tools are being used to help raise money for important causes. The tools leveraged in the above article include a Sprout widget with a ChipIn component that allows donors to contribute quickly and easily with a few clicks.  Here is the fundraising widget that the Huffington Post uses:

The numbers are phenomenal for this campaign.  The initial goal was to raise $10,000 and that was achieved before the end of the first day. One nice feature of Sprout Builder is that it’s easy to update widgets in real time, wherever they are embedded, so it was possible to increase the goal on the fly. Donor engagement has also been impressive, with over 730 comments as of the date of this post.

You don’t need to be a huge organization to achieve similar results.  This technology is currently available at http://sproutbuilder.com where anyone can create a similar fundraising widget by signing up for Sprout Builder subscription.  We have seen a large number of non-profits using Sprout to both raise money and promote their organizations.  Some of the non-profits using Sprout include the Red Cross,  Youth Noise, National Marrow Donor Program, and more!

What are the most innovative ways you have seen fundraising executed online?

Personalization: MySpace vs. Facebook

Remember when MySpace was growing like Facebook is now? You’ll probably recall a profile page, for a friend or a band, that had a crazy background, flashing icons, music playing, and an overall chaotic user experience. While painful, especially when looking for a particular bit of information on the page, that chaos meant something important to the person who created it. However, to say it was like listening to jazz for the first time would be generous, because the chaos emerged from a lack of html standards on the site (i.e. users were free to use html poorly).

The structured experience on Facebook was very much a reaction to MySpace’s looseness. The drag and drop modular components offer some of the same features but lock into a page grid that resists personalization. No setting colors, backgrounds, embedding videos, music players, etc. That said, the standardization and rigidity have made the information on Facebook pages easy to find while supporting a consistent user experience.

When Facebook created the Static Facebook Markup Langauage (FBML) application a couple years ago, they acknowledged the limitations of their rigid structure and created a way for Facebook fan page administrators to personalize fan pages . Overnight it was possible to customize fan pages like MySpace profile pages, but users still needed to code using FBML. Combined with the fact that Facebook users were acclimated to the site’s rigidity, they didn’t exactly jump on the opportunity.  And, it didn’t help that Facebook buried the application on their site.

Come Together Right Now

Different user experiences attracted different communities. The MySpace community has always been focused on entertainment and the Facebook community started on college campuses where socializing and networking were primary drivers. As the communities have grown and aged, however, feature sets have expanded and led to increasing diversity in each community and thus overlap between them.

As this has been unfolding, MySpace has been jockeying to protect their position as the leading community for entertainment, which is manifest in their strategic acquisition of iLike back in August. This was a key purchase because iLike’s Facebook music application was the first to gain real traction in the network. As such, it was a direct threat to MySpace’s ability to serve one of it’s core community segments, bands. A year earlier TechCrunch wrote about how music may be the single biggest factor keeping MySpace competitive. Apparently MySpace agrees, but acquiring iLike won’t stop the larger trend towards personalization because with personalization comes entertainment.

What’s Next

The one remaining barrier that’s stopping Facebook and MySpace users from creating personalized fan pages is FBML. The key to overcoming this barrier is a visual authoring tool that allows users to create rich, interactive, and engaging pages without writing a line of code. This is where visual authoring tools like Sprout Builder come in.

Visual authoring tools remove the technology barrier to personalization. Their drag and drop user interfaces are intuitive which makes them to learn, especially for designers or creatives who are already familiar with tools like Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator. While easy to use, these tools are surprisingly powerful, incorporating rss feeds, music players, slide shows, twitter feeds, etc. In fact, developers are switching to visual authoring tools because they are easier to use and much faster.

All Together Now

Because visual authoring tools export a .swf file (a Flash file), what you create can be embedded on any webpage. This means you can post a personalized Facebook fan page simply by copying and pasting the embed code into the Static FBML application (and soon, you’ll probably be able to post to Facebook with just a click). Plus, you can allow your fans to grab the embed code and share your creation on their profiles or fan pages as well. Another bonus of working with Sprout Builder is that no matter where or how many times your creation gets embedded, all the copies can be updated at once from inside the tool. In other words, you could embed your creation on your Facebook fan page AND your MySpace profile, allowing you to update them in both places at the same time and with one tool. While there are other services out there that can update your content across a variety of networks, such as Ping.fm, they won’t let you customize your entire personalized look and feel.

Sprout Builder also resolves the music/entertainment problem for Facebook because it allows bands to build personalized fan pages with music playlists, slideshows, videos and more. Hopefully, visual authoring tools will help bands reach out to their fan communities whether they are on MySpace, Facebook, or elsewhere. And for MySpace and Facebook, competing on something other than personalization should benefit all users.

Facebook & MySpace Demos

If you’re interested in learning  how to place your Sprout Builder creation on your Fanpage, check out this demo video:

And if you’d like to get your creation on your MySpace profile, check out this demo:

Photo credit: thesharath