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Video: Squarespace Launches Social Widgets (Joins 21st Century)

Video: Squarespace Launches Social Widgets (Joins 21st Century)

It looks like the boys and girls at Squarespace are (finally) embracing social widgets, which will allow users to easily embed content from both Twitter and Flickr (with promises that Digg and Delicious will be integrated in the future).

So what took Squarespace so long? They wanted to “get it right.”

The Squarespace social widgets are a bridge to popular external services. Normally when embedding 3rd party services like Flickr, Twitter, etc. to your site, your site load times will be dramatically slowed down as your content is loaded from these services around the web. Squarespace Social Widgets pre-fetch your data from these services and merge the configuration into your already familiar Squarespace control panel –while keeping the widget look and feel appropriate for your Squarespace site. (Official Squarespace Blog)

While WordPress and Blogger fans have been blessed with social widgets for many months now (if not years), Squarespace has been surprisingly slow on the social front (which is strange considering how powerful their platform is, especially when compared against rivals).

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Even though it’s good to see Squarespace making it easier to embed content off site, they need to redouble their efforts on the “social sharing” front, as the platform still has not embraced the Facebook like button (a feature that’s already available on Typepad and WordPress).

Squarespace is one of the most advanced blogging platforms in the world (especially when it comes to blogging on the iPhone), but unless they want to lose out to the competition they need to take the social networking plunge ASAP.

View Comments (4)
  • I think this is an opportunity for Squarespace to determine who are really their most loyal users. I for one know many Squarespace users who really didn’t mind that the widget took some time to become available.

  • Just to clarify — Squarespace users have been integrating 3rd party social widgets from Flickr, Twitter, and the like for years. These widgets are different:

    1) We’re caching content from the remote systems ensuring your page doesn’t take 10+ seconds to load. Your page will stay up no matter the responsiveness of external services. You could put 10 twitter streams on one page and it would load instantly.

    2) The widget configuration is completely managed by Squarespace — including visual configuration with an extensive array of visual options.

    3) The widgets can merge multiple usernames and streams into a single presentation area, etc. Others can not.

    …amongst other things…

    This isn’t just us letting you drop in stuff everyone else was already doing — which is what we mean by “getting it right”.

    Hope this clarifies!

  • Thanks for clarifying Casalena! I guess caching tweets and flickr photos has its advantages over simply embedding content, and its good to see you find an innovative way of doing this.

    Any word on when you guys and gals will include Facebook within the mix? Especially the like button (as many of your clients have been asking about it).

  • I can say: EXTREMELY soon. We had a huge back-end scaling project, and this social widget project, which are now completed.

    Will be posting on the scaling project soon — which has thus far been invisible.

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