The DEMO conference happened this week and it gave a lot of companies the opportunity to step out and show their new, innovative ideas/concepts to industry leaders, bloggers and journalists. Needless to say, social media, communication and collaboration were hot topics at the conference.

As I was looking through some of the blogs covering DEMO, I ran across an extremely positive post from prolific tech watcher Marshall Kirkpatrick talking about a widget creation web application called Sprout.

Sprout describes its service as a way to create sophisticated and dynamic interactive content. That pretty much means it’s an easy to use, drag and drop widget maker. The widgets can be anything from an RSS feed reader, like the one I created below, to a countdown clock, to an MP3 player.

After getting my invitation from Sprout I took about a half hour to build my first “sprout.” After a bit of tinkering (and some UI frustration) I ended up with this feed reader for this blog…something that I could add to any website I choose. Pretty cool, but what I really like is that sprout is made to hook into dozens of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Orcut. So, in effect, you can create a Facebook widget without having to know how to code for Facebook…pretty neat. Here’s what the widget looks like:

Marshall thinks Sprout has a lot of potential, and as long as they can build some post DEMO buzz, I think I agree with him. As Sprout’s features grow I can see potential for using the service to create interesting affiliate-type widgets…so if I were you I’d sign up for an invite and spend a little time seeing what you can come up with.