CLIQ, a dynamic blogroll widget which has been running in the sidebar of the Silicon Florist since I covered the tool in September 2007, is being shutdown as of January 31, 2008.
The widget was built by Portland-based StepChange Group in concert with Offermatica.
CLIQ was created as a joint-venture with our partner Offermatica – the leading online testing optimization platform, which was recently acquired by Omniture, Inc. StepChange managed all aspects of CLIQ’s strategy, design, development and has managed launch process for Offermatica (including the Private Alpha and Public Beta Programs).
I spoke to Kevin Tate of StepChange Group to get his perspective on CLIQ’s demise. He said his organization was taking the news in stride, seeing it as an opportunity for more Portland-centric efforts.
“While we’ve enjoyed working on CLIQ, we’re frankly looking forward to having more bandwidth at StepChange to put toward our own product development,” said Tate. “From a ‘Portland Perspective,’ it feels good to be able to let some of our project work go, so that we can spend more energy building a great software company here in PDX.”
The news of CLIQ’s shutdown was broken by Jeffro2pt0, who had this to say on the demise of the fledgling widget:
[W]hy Cliq is shutting down?
As it turns out, CLIQ was a client of Offermatica, INC and was built as a way to extend their story into the social media space. Well, Offermatica has since been acquired by Omniture. Omniture already has a number of projects within the social media space and therefor, it makes no sense for them to continue development and funding for Cliq.
Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins, who covered the story for Mashable, offered a similar assessment:
Clearly, part of the reason the service is being shut down is that it didn’t receive the traction it needed to survive the merger; other projects within the Omniture family had a wider userbase in the same space.
Personally, I found the widget useful, inasmuch as it provided additional metrics for determining what Silicon Florist traffic was generated by other Portland blogs. Plus, it served as another yardstick for assessing the popularity of companies, subjects, and stories.
Finally, I’m a bit chagrin to report that CLIQ also gains the dubious honor of being the first tool covered by Silicon Florist to go under.
An email will be sent to all CLIQ users, informing them of the Omniture decision.
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That’s too bad. I thought it was a cool widget. Good luck with the next project StepChange.