Nearly every company these days is racing to that next big thing to ensure their product or service is being seen by the masses. Portals and search engines have been, and will continue to be prominent. But there has been a stampede toward social networks as companies figure out how best to traverse that world, how to be visible without tarnishing the social environments sites like Facebook and Bebo and MySpace have tried to create. MixerCast has taken an interesting stab at helping big brands effectively use these platforms.

MixerCast CEO Jennifer Cooper calls her company's solution an Operating System for Widgets. The technology started as a mashup platform that brings all types of media together, but quickly evolved into this social network building block.

The idea is to take pre-existing widgets (built in Flash by MixerCast or possibly pre-built on your own) and put them together to quickly create an application. For example, New Line Cinema's promotion of Semi Pro included an interactive contest that required users to create a music video using some of the promotional content. MixerCast helped New Line Cinema create the container of content and use widgets that let users take that content, upload a video, and share that video with the community; that community extended to Facebook, Bebo, YouTube, and Friendster.

MixerCast says that it will sell this capability, but they also are interested in doing revenue sharing arrangements based on the success of these engagements. That may be a rough road, especially with the big brands, but it's an interesting approach. Now they've got to figure out how to become the Widget OS for mobile.