Introducing Our Multilingual Contact Importer Widget

Posted on March 5, 2012 by graeme

I’m excited to announce that the CloudSponge widget is now multilingual! You can customize the language or even the tone of the widget to match your site. You can configure it to include your own site name in the content. Whatever you want the widget to display, it’s your call.

Our beta customers have been using our widget to import contacts in Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese and a few other languages so far.  We can’t wait to see what other languages the rest of you decide to use.

Here’s a screen shot of a Turkish customization of the widget:

turkish widget

To use the feature, sign into your CloudSponge account and select “New Language”. Fill out the form to customize each bit of text on our widget. If you change the language, set the language code to a 2-letter ISO Language Codes. You can find a list of them here.

Once you have created your language, you’ll need to adjust your configuration to use it on your domain by specifying it in your widget snippet. For example:

var csPageOptions = {
  domain_key: "YOUR_DOMAIN_KEY",
  locale: "turkish",
  // your other options here ...
}

And that’s it!  Please let us know if you have any questions.

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Announcing Deep Widget Links

Posted on November 22, 2011 by graeme

Everyone knows that for each action you ask your users take in a process a percentage of them will drop off. Removing friction points is a critical step in any user interface improvement process.

Also key to a positive user experience is consistency. We’ve received many requests to make the widget more customizable and integrate more seamlessly into your sites.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve created a new feature that removes a friction point for your users and puts you in more control of the look and feel. We call it “deep widget links”.

Deep widget links allow you to hyperlink to each address book source directly on your page and style them however you like, effectively skipping over the menu page of our default widget.

Implementing this new feature just requires a small change to your code snippet. Replace the basic “Add From Address Book” link with your own styled links to each address book source:

<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('yahoo')">Yahoo</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('gmail')">Gmail</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('windowslive')">Live</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('aol')">Aol</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('plaxo')">Plaxo</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('outlook')">Outlook</a>
<a onclick="cloudsponge.launch('addressbook')">Mac Address Book</a>

The links in this sample are basic text; since you are adding this code, you can add images and css styling to suite your site.

Check out our contact importer documentation and our contact importer support thread for more details.

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Scaling on Demand

Posted on November 3, 2011 by graeme

We had a slowdown starting around 7:30 am PT today when one of our customers went live with a promotion that uses our contact importer widget. At its peak, this traffic tripled the activity on our API and pushed the capacity of our infrastructure. Unfortunately, this caused our widget to respond very slowly during this period.

We were alerted to the issue and responded immediately. We quickly upgraded our infrastructure to handle the new demand. By 9 am, our average response time had dropped to about 1/3 of its value before the additional traffic. That means that we’re now handling 3 times as much traffic 3 times faster than we were this morning.

We’re committed to ensuring stability and reliability of our product.

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Integrate Your Flash Movie with our API

Posted on October 24, 2011 by graeme

Flash Player EnabledYou’ve asked for a better user experience when integrating with our API using a Flash movie. We’re listening!

We’ve added a Flash policy file to make our API accessible to Flash applications without prompting a security dialog. Our API is now seamlessly accessible from Flash applications giving our customers another option for integrating with it.

Flash is the latest complement to our integration lineup. We now have customers integrating with our REST API using PHP, Ruby, .Net, Flash, Java and Javascript. Is there anyone else integrating with us using a different platform?

We welcome and value all our customers’ feedback and suggestions for how we can build a better product. Join the conversation on our support community.

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Welcome Plaxo Widget Customers

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Jay

PlaxoWe’re happy to announce that the fine people at Plaxo have worked out a deal with us to help all of their widget customers transition to CloudSponge when they retire their address book importing widget on October 31, 2011.  At their request, we’ve done two things to ease the transition:

First, we’re extending an extra long free trial period to all Plaxo widget customers to provide enough time for evaluation of our product before paying for it.  We realize that this is a transition from a free product to a paid one, so we want to be extra sensitive to make sure that we’re providing as much value as possible and being fair with our pricing for smaller websites.

Second, we’ve made several minor adaptations to our integration technique to make the technical part of the transition as seamless as possible.  We even made a short video to show you how easy it is (tl;dr… it’s a 5-minute copy/paste job):

We’re looking forward to working with each and every Plaxo widget customer to give them a new home, please try us out and feel free to drop us a line anytime you need extra support or special treatment from us.

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