• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 3, 2009

Less than two years after its official launch, social syndication startup iWidgets announced today that it has raised $4.1 million in Series A funding led by existing backer Opus Capital, along with University Venture Fund. 

"We plan to use the money to continue to refine our product and take it to market," said Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets.

The private San Francisco-based company also announced the addition of Geoff Katz as vice president of business development and marketing. Katz most recently served at vice president and general manager for the San Francisco office of digital agency Code And Theory.

IWidgets' technology helps publishers get their content onto social sites and portals including Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and iGoogle. Instead of going to the trouble of creating an "app" for Facebook, or relying on word-of-mouth to promote a site, iWidgets lets publishers create widgets that can be placed and easily spread online.

The rationale is that embedding applications on networks where people spend more time online builds brand awareness more effectively than banner advertising.

"The iWidgets platform creates a new model for television shows and other kinds of media to reach an audience online and to go viral with messages and promotions by tapping into the social graph," said Katz.

The platform offers full customization of widgets as well as native deployment onto social networks.

Potential rivals like Clearspring and Gigya presently allow publishers to turn their content into widgets and syndicate them broadly, but Yared insists that iWidgets is positioned to benefit from their distribution expertise.

"We just partnered with Clearspring, and have a similar deal with WidgetBox, because of their ability to distribute," said Yared. "But, they don't help you build a widget like we do, and they don't deploy deeply into a social network's system."