Sprout Builder

I subscribe to Mashable, who in my opinion provides the best social network news. If you have any sort of geek within in you, and you’re not already, subscribe and read. There’s not only a wealth of news and reviews, but a generous amount of invitations for new startups. One article featured newcomer, Sprout, who just launched at Demo08. Sprout offers it’s users the ability to create and build their own multi-page widgets. For the most part it’s simple to use with the ease of uploading your own “assets” (images, audio, videos, flash) and dragging and dropping it onto your widget canvas or instead of starting from scratch, you can choose one of many template. Basic familiarity of Photoshop is helpful, but Sprouts ease of use is so comfortable that it won’t take long to understand the properties.

If you’re thinking that you don’t have enough geek within you to require your own sprout, consider your desktop, MySpace, Facebook or NetVibes. Yes, Sprouts work on all of those and more! In fact you can instantly publish to the different social networks or grab the embed code to submit to a widget directory site to share with subscribers.

I built my widget, with some familiarity of Photoshop and without reading or viewing any instructions in about a heavily interrupted hour. My widget is just one page with buttons that link to either my blog or Twitter account, and both From the Mind of NEENZ and www.faleafine.com also link to this site. Once I was done, I clicked on publish and was offered a variety of choice to publish my widget. It’s that simple, with unlimited use.

Sprouts are also easy to manage after publishing your widget. all other widgets will also automatically update. So your subscribers will receive the updates without the hassle of having to delete and embed the widget again. I encourage you to both embed and share my widget, however keep in mind that I’ve discovered a new toy with an abundance of use so things may change. Also, I appreciate any feedback or suggestions. I have created a WIDGET page above and will be adding new and different widgets that Sprout From the Mind of NEENZ.