Dear Twitter, we see your 31 providers and raise you 134. Embedly (YC W10) | Hacker News Reader

Dear Twitter, we see your 31 providers and raise you 134. Embedly (YC W10)

blog.embed.ly

82 pointsscreeley20 comments

What do you bet Twitter at least got approval from those 31 providers? StatSheet is listed as one of Embedly's "supported" providers but they never asked us if we were ok with it. It's not like they are even using an API from us...just scraping.

Would you have provided an API if they had asked?

I don't think thats the point. The point is they are scraping content without seeking approval.

True. They did not ask for permission nor forgiveness.

Embedly is interesting, but this seems like yet another service that really ought to be a client-side Javascript library. I see no advantage to this being a service, besides the fact that the client-side code can be a little thinner.

Besides, if the source was available, it would be trivial to set up your own "Embedly" endpoint, and reap all the benefits of thin client-side code while having control over your infrastructure.

I've been running oohEmbed.com, a similar service, for more than two years now. The problem with doing this in client-side JS is that (a) the oEmbed spec doesn't specify json callbacks so oembed providers don't support callbacks making async stuff in the browser difficult; (b) dealing with SOAP APIs, html parsing, etc. are difficult to say the least within browsers.

But if you really want to do this without relying on an external service, you can take the oohEmbed.com source (BSD licensed) and run it as your own 'private' Google App Engine app. oohEmbed.com itself is App Engine hosted.

If you haven't used Embed.ly js library, umm, you better try it today. It's pretty awesome. I wish twitter had Embed.ly out of the box. Oh well.

If you're using mootools, I've written a simple wrapper for Embedly (available under BSD).

https://github.com/sharkbrainguy/Chorus/blob/master/Source/E...

That's cool! I've only used it with jQuery so far, I might try this for my next project involving mootools.

Maybe they will will, soon. :)

One can hope, anyhow.

We made a tinyMCE plugin using Embed.ly and put it in our CMS. Clients LOVE it. (http://docs.gethifi.com/editors/multimedia/embed-ly-uploadin...)

Embed.ly is a great idea and the team has executed it well.

Yeah, I'm sure that wouldn't cripple them at all...

That is a string bet and would get you thrown out of any real card game. Despite the fact they do it in every movie.

Since we're being nit-picky, this wouldn't get you thrown out of a real card game. The raise would simply be pushed back by the dealer.

Holy shit. This is such a good idea.

Really good implementation as well! I hope you guys are adding the Amazon affiliate link to the amazon links! :)

If I recall correctly, Embedly offered a patch to Reddit when Reddit open sourced everything that integrated Embedly.
I like this approach for their business model. Instead of pitching to companies about why they should use their service, they show them how they can be integrated.

Found the link: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/04/now-this-is-how-you-pitch-you...

Nice Job embedly, your api kicks ass. Using for a project as we speak:)

Is there a download for this so that I can do this stuff server-side without making tons of curl requests to your site? I really don't want to add JavaScript that is going to create tons of further requests (per link on the page).

i.e, is there a URL for an XML file that contains all of the definitions that are in use so that I can cache that and update it once per day and work off the cached copy for processing things server-side?

I realise I can query to see what services that you support, but on a page containing 20 links I'd still have to make 20 separate requests to perform the embeds. So... if I wanted to do this server-side without adding a dependency on a third party service I'd have to call per-link, how could I do it?

Check out our docs we support multi-get via a "urls" params as well as list server side libs, http://api.embed.ly/docs/oembed. You can cache this json call for services, http://api.embed.ly/docs/service

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2005761

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