Embedly (YC W10): A Call for Publishers | Hacker News Reader

Embedly (YC W10): A Call for Publishers

blog.embed.ly

27 pointsarthurgibson16 comments

I haven't used oEmbed before, but I really like that it's possible to specify a max height or max width. That's not anything that Embedly's bringing to the table, it's just nice.

I do really like the idea of only having to call one service in order to get the embed code for a multitude of content.

What's the monetization plan? X free calls per month, $ after that? The only reason I'd be wary of using this service is that it could move to a model like that in the future, and I'd be locked in. Although, for the lack of up-front development time to integrate easily-embeddable content, it might be worth it.

You can use the embedly api right now, the only thing we ask is if you call us server side to provide a valid user agent. Heres the docs, http://api.embed.ly/documentation and if you want to promote your site we'll put it up on our developers page.

Maybe you should use visuals to explain what embed.ly does.

Exactly! A demo will also help.

Demos are now at the bottom of the post. Thanks

They should make a "what is this?" link on the front page, instead of people having to guess "API".

I don't do much front end web development, so I'm not 100% sure I get the point, let me know if I get this correctly:

Problem 1: You want to embed things from different sites. You have to learn each of their APIs. Come oembed, there's just one that all participants agree on. whateversite.com/oembed/url=$url&otherparams=stuff (where $url is within whateversite.com) which saves a lot of code and debugging efforts.

Problem 2: You still have to send requests for embedding for a.com to a.com, and so forth. Come embedly, you can send all your requests to the same place, embed.ly/url=$url

Thing is, Problem 2 seems trivial compared to Problem 1. oembed seems to do almost everything I'd want. I'm already testing if a given link is in embed.ly's list, right? I have the link I want to embed, I'm sending it to embedly. I might as well parse out the domain, add the oembed path, and send it to the source.

We are working on better ways to present it, we would definitely welcome some suggestions on how to make it clearer, support@embed.ly.

re: problem 2, some sites that use us do a mix of calling the source and embed.ly, we generally are faster on subsequent calls to the same url and also we support sites that don't roll their own.

Need examples.

We added examples to the Post. Thanks.

Examples are good...but that wasn't necessarily the point.

Why can't you simply state this:

"Paste a link, and the original photo/video/tweet will be shown below it"

It took me 30 seconds to realize this when you gave the http://www.sharedy.com/ example.

How am I supposed to know if those are not "natural" embeds?

I'm sorry, I just saw your "links into embeds" branding. That should work. Thank you and sorry.

Wow thats pretty cool. The sharedy.com example is particularly compelling. This really advances link sharing a step. It would be awesome to have something like this preview links in emails, IM's etc. Nice work

>the Washington Post and Funny Or Die

I bet the Washington Post just loves being lumped in with Funny Or Die as a content producer. :)

Definitely contrasting content, we were trying to convey the broadness of our service.

I still don't understand what it does. An animation that explains embedly will help you greatly.

If you want a quick look, check out http://www.sharedy.com/ you will see most of the links turning into embeds.

Also if you post a link there, say from youtube or funnyordie it will also turn into an embed.

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