Gettin Jiggy 'Widget'

Bad pun, but accurate nonetheless.

Last week the venerable Squarespace (SQ) —our fair host— released their new Social Networking Widgets. They're still ramping up the services these widgets support, but a good start was made with Flickr, Twitter and RSS.

Overview

Widget Configuration (click to enlarge)As is their custom, they did more than simply provide a widgetty interface and sidebar module for snatching data from across one's social media accounts, a process that can lead to long page load times while waiting for external servers to provide the data needed to finish running the script calling for it:

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.

...and

Squarespace social widgets import and host all of your external data —your site will never go down with Twitter, and will always load instantly no matter how many streams you import. If you have one embeded, or 15— your site will always load quickly.

After using these modules for a week or so, I can say that SQ is delivering what they promised.

The New

Of particular interest is the "style selector" embedded in the widget configuration. Social widgets include a style selector within the widget itself to let you control how you want your social data displayed. As seen at right, one has several options for how the widget will initially be configured, and complete CSS control once it has been configured.

However, what really interests me is the potential this kind of provision has when it comes to creating and configuring other modules and pages within the SQ system. One can only begin to daydream about the added customizations that could be made to galleries, journals and a host of other often used modules, all based on a built-in solution that goes beyond replicating plug-in functionality by adding embedded, systemic functionality. This is big!

Summary

• Social networking widget: good.
• Hooks deep in the system: great!
• Polished configuration UI: fantastic!
• Style selector potential: freakin' A!!

The SQ devs may be a little late to this embedded-social-networking-widget-thing game, but they clearly thought it through and did it right.