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var so = new SWFObject("http://www.squarespace.com/storage/sqplayer/SquarespaceVideoPlayer_v1.1.2.swf", "SSplayer", "500", "280", "10", "#f4f4f4"); so.addVariable("playerURL", "http://www.squarespace.com/storage/sqplayer/SquarespaceVideoPlayer_v1.1.2.swf"); so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always"); so.addParam("allowFullScreen", "true"); so.addParam("quality", "best"); so.addParam("scale", "noscale"); so.addParam("loop", "false"); so.addParam("wmode", "transparent"); // Video settings so.addVariable("video","http://s3.media.squarespace.com/production/356274/3802375/2710/social-hq-500-audio.flv"); so.addVariable("graphic", "http://www.squarespace.com/storage/sqplayer/sq-social-bg.png"); so.addVariable("title", "Social Widgets"); so.write("flashContainer");

Some big news!  Our social widgets are now rolling live for our customers.  The widgets are now running on our live servers and a group of commando testers have been trying their best to break them over the past few weeks. I'll admit we spent about a week or two longer than I would have hoped on this, but I hope it's worth the wait.  The dust has settled and we're pretty confident they're in good shape.

  • Flickr, Twitter, and RSS (Initially!).  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.  We'll be expanding to more services after our core set has settled in (next on the list are Digg and Delicious).
  • Visual Presets. Squarespace has a number of excellent templates, but we've never provided visual presets for individual components on a site. Social widgets includes a style selector within the widget itself to let you control how you want your social data displayed.
  • Style Mode Integration. Social widgets include full integration with the fonts, colors, and style configuration panel so you can tweak the widgets any way you want. I've definitely never seen a social widget this customizable before!
  • MongoDB. This phenomenal document store, used by the likes of gilt.com and nytimes.com, is powering the back end. We know you've got a lot of social data out there and we're pulling your data feeds in and storing it on our servers. Thus, you won't be subject to the notoriously variable load speeds and downtime for all of the social services you're dealing with.

As always with any new feature, there may be some kinks to iron out.  Feel free to open a ticket if you see anything strange. We have an exciting May planned, so stay tuned!