Behold the amazing power of Sprout, a quick and easy way to build all those widgets, jukeboxes, and mini-sites you've been dreaming of, both for clients and personal projects. My first endeavor into using the service, aka my first Sprout, was a widget of passion.

Even before going on my big fall eurotrip, I decided that upon returning I was going to chuck out the idea of the traditional scrapbook and latch onto more web 2.0 ways of recording my experiences. By using Sprout, I was able to develop a "mini-site" of most of my digital vacation artifacts (music, photos, videos, maps, research) within a few hours, and to their credit, most of that time was spent in designing, collecting, and uploading.

The actual interface within Sprout Builder made the entire process intuitive and quick, and when I was finished, I was able to instantly bring my Sprout into my Myspace page, Facebook page, Netvibes account, and now here on ThreeMinds. Although it has a few bugs and limitations, I was more surprised at how much it COULD do and how much it did well. Any users of Photoshop or Flash will be able to dive right in, but I think it would be easy to pick up for most anyone.