Announcing Deep Widget Links

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

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

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

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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Heineken Facebook App uses CloudSponge

We’ve been working with the guys over at Heineken to get CloudSponge working on the Heineken Star Player Facebook App, and I’m happy to announce that as of today, it’s live!

Go check it out!

You need to make a league in their application so that you can have access to the league management interface where you’ll invite friends to play with you.

If you’d rather not go through the process of making your own league, I made a short video to show you how it looks:

Huge thanks to the guys over at AKQA and Heineken for working through this with us, I think a ton of Facebook App developers will follow your lead in order to let their users invite non-Facebook members to their applications.

Cheers!

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