One API to Rule them All (Embed.ly) | Hacker News Reader

One API to Rule them All (Embed.ly)

api.embed.ly

30 pointsgeez10 comments

Its very interesting and would certainly like to put it on some of my sites, but the lack of a paid plan is turning me off for 2 reasons:

1: Without a revenue method, how will they survive? I dont want to spend time integrating with something thats going to possibly go away.

2: If it does stay free, it makes me feel like I should expect little "powered by embed.ly" things being inserted into the code I get back some day.

Anyways, to summarize: Id like to use your product, but wont do it unless you charge for it or somehow make a server version that does not need to call out (similar to how Maxmind GeoIP is setup).

There are very few "free" services that I rely on, and the ones that I do are typically large open source projects (ie- apache, linux, etc..) or free offerings by huge companies that wont go anywhere (recaptcha)

So basically, if your intention is to keep it free, why not make a downloadable database of codes we can update from time to time with cron? It would be more economical in every sense and doesnt force our webapps to stop working if your servers go down.

who is the customer for Embed.ly?

I imagine this is useful for people who make mashup style apps that plug into various different services, but is that a big enough market size?

If I'm just plugging into one service, it's better to use the direct API than go through a middle man. If I'm using a dozen different services, I see the point of Embed.ly, but I don't see a huge business opportunity. Perhaps I'm missing something?

I use Embed.ly for a side-project site I hacked together quickly (www.senioritis.com) and I love it.

The beauty of Embed.ly is that users can submit a link, my site calls out to Embed.ly, and Embed.ly returns HTML for embedding in the page. In my quick hack I don't even check whether Embed.ly can handle the link, etc. but just embed the HTML if the response isn't nil (though I understand the XSS risks and need to fix it).

Parse the JSON response of: Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse("http://api.embed.ly/v1/api/oembed?url=#{self.web_link}))

and you're set. I love how simple it is.

One thing re Embed.ly, their server sometimes takes some time to respond and so I recommend using DelayedJob. Right now my horrible hack just uses an after_create hook in rails to call the Embed.ly server in the same thread but sometimes that times out or has a noticeable delay.

I think the biggest use for this would be when you don't always know the source of the video. Like with user-submitted stuff.

It can also be useful for very useful for aggregators.

Hmm...HN + Embed.ly + Userscript?

I totally see that.

I guess my point is - are aggregators and their ilk going to make for good paying customers? there's not much money to be made in aggregating since the barrier to entry is so low (because tools like Embed.ly exist!).

Does a service like this exist to do the opposite?

That is, a service that let's you submit / post data to one place and have it then pushed to multiple services / APIs as a result?

I think Wufoo does this for forms. But they wouldn't be a feasible solution for development.

Posterous will do this for multimedia - you email it as an attachment or upload it (or there is API access, I believe) and it will upload it to the appropriate site(s) based on the accounts you have set up (photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, etc).

It will also create a Posterous blog but you don't need to make it public.

http://ping.fm is this what you want?

API docs: http://groups.google.com/group/pingfm-developers/web/api-doc...

Check out PixelPipe

http://pixelpipe.com/

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