April 22nd, 2008
Sprout releases SDK
Yesterday Sprout (my previous writeup), the company that lets you build Flash widgets right inside the browser, launched an SDK that will let 3rd parties take advantage of the service for their own offerings. The company used the SDK to create components for Twitter and Seesmic that can be dropped into any Sprout the end user creates.
Aside from the fact that Sprout is built in Flex, one of the most interesting things I saw about Sprout was the way it leveraged the Flash platform. It launched with a Ribbit widget that would let you make calls from your Sprout. There are all kinds of interesting things in the Flash world but with the Sprout SDK, anyone can now create components for Sprout and instantly have that content added to the libraries of users.
Another very cool aspect to the SDK is that the components come with analytical tools and data. If you create a component for your service you’ll be able to track when that component gets added or removed as well as when that component is used somewhere. So you can essentially aggregate data from your component across every Sprout that uses it in the network. That distributed analytics could be very interesting as a test market or as a quick way to see what components are the most interesting to users and developers. Dividing up the two segments is a great idea.
I’m not sure what Sprout’s user base looks like. I haven’t come across a ton of embedded Sprouts as I wander around the web, but I think they’ve got a solid developer base and with new partners and offerings, the “embedability” should increase.
Coté and I recorded a small interview with Carnett Williams, the CEO and Founder of Sprout for RIA Weekly.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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