Gigya’s Big Win With Top Widget Companies

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

For developers designing for the other 99.9 percent of the web not running solely on Facebook, Gigya offers Wildfire, a simple interface for spreading, tracking, and monetizing your widget across 12 social sites. They’ve been chosen to handle distribution and tracking for 6 of the top 10 Widget properties (RockYou!, PictureTrail, BunnyHeroLabs, BlingyBlob.com, POQbum and Projectplaylist.com), as categorized by ComScore’s Widget Metrix. Combined, the 6 partners have a total audience of 193 million unique visitors.

Gigya’s “embed this” widget is a simple tabbed menu of social sites that lets anyone post your embed code to their page by just entering their credentials. It even works with Facebook applications. You can see the full list of partners here.

It’s a distinctly different strategy than what other widget tool startups are doing. We reported on another company, ClearSpring, which similarly helped developers track and spread their application. However, in contrast to Gigya, ClearSpring is open to any developer and focuses on widgetizing content, not easily posting them to social sites. Gigya is aimed at enabling large widget publishers low friction adoption on social sites.

Gigya recently closed a round of funding with Benchmark and First Round Capital $2.4 million on June 25th.