A Healthy Dose of Sprouts.

Sprout is now in open beta (thanks to Shel Holtz for blogging this - and by the way if you’re not reading Shel then you’re missing a treat. His “For Immediate Release” podcast is also completely awesome). You want to know about Sprout because it places high-level interactive functions into the hands of utter novices and makes them work nonetheless.

To prove this, I spent some time signing up and creating a news feed sprout for the (currently pitiful) GamerNirvana.com. Et voila!

This sprout pulls a news feed from a Yahoo! Pipe and displays it in itty bitty form. It’s a little buggy (right now it seems to be preferring certain feed items over others) but it’s very nifty nonetheless. Took about 10 minutes, most of which was configuring the pipe.

Applications are endless. Each of the members of your company could have Sprouts providing some background. There is a “Causes” template that allows you to funnel people to your favorite nonprofit (or to a “Draft Colbert” website, if you prefer). You can have embedded video or audio, creating a mini-podcast player in any webpage you want. The one problem is that some of the more aggressive ad blockers available might auto-block Sprouts as being “ads,” since they’re flashy little boxes of stuff. My particular ad blocker gives me the option of blocking multimedia, and focuses on listed ad servers. So I don’t have this problem. Your results may vary, but again, the point is not that the service is young, or that there may be snags to work out. This is a potent and effective web tool that the average Power Point user will be able to figure out. Ignore at your peril, adopt and gain significant engagement from visitors.