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).
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.
