See my new sprout

http://farm.sproutbuilder.com/2341/load/cACdIgrQADCA209Z.swf

The widget to the left was created using Sprout - in fact they insist that those be called "Sprouts" - don't ask me why. Notice how it's spinning and counting down? It's flash.

Sprout is a very cool service with which I can create widgets which are actually live Flash scripts that do interesting things. Sprout will host them on their servers, and let me link to them with an embed code.

But it gets more interesting. Notice how there's a share button? If you click on that it will show you embed code so you can further put that (wonderful little) widget on your site too. And it gets cooler still, becuase there are metrics collected so I can follow these widgets as they travel through the web. Cool.

I can think of some powerful yet simple things to do with these, like how about we create some 'i Love BlogBridge' badges, that look cool and get people to put them on their sites (how? I don't know, but…) And they can be animated and even include actions which get measured separately.

The possibilities are great!