101 ways to Embed Content: The State of Embedly | Hacker News Reader

101 ways to Embed Content: The State of Embedly

blog.embed.ly

20 pointsscreeley7 comments

hi, any idea what problem embed.ly solves. it seems like having a mapping of 30 odd services/urls -> to their oembed codes.

it abstracts out the hunt for the embed code for a particular resource, just give them the url and get back an embed code.

Is this a company hoping to make profit? Cause the only thing I can see them making a profit from is switching to a paid model when they've got you hooked in to their API some date into the future.

Now wouldn't that be awful. We gain your trust, lure you in and then pull the old bait and switch.

That's is not going to happen. As the post states:

> As we continue to grow we will start having product offerings as well as additional APIs.

Wait, so you're just gonna keep this free service going? Or is this product going to turn out to be "hey our API is still free but only for N requests a month"?

Maybe they will get money from developers of the APIs opting into their service. As in, give us $X a month, and we will handle all your embedding needs and get your content out there to a ton of different services.

Like, think if Embedly was used for some music recommendation application that pulled together results from Last.fm, Pandora, Grooveshark, and Mog. If I was a developer of an up and coming music playing/recommendation site, I would definitely pay some dough to get included in that group for the web application. It's a win-win, the developer of the mashup gets access to a greater variety of content, I, as the developer of the new music service site, get my website's name out there, and Embedly gets money in the process.

But if I, as a developer of a mashup, wanted to use this new music recommendation site and Embedly didn't offer it because that site didn't want to pay up, I could just circumvent Embedly and go against the site's API directly at little cost.

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