4 ms·

Embedly (YC W10): A Call for Publishers

27 points by arthurgibson 16y ago

talbina 16y ago
Maybe you should use visuals to explain what embed.ly does.
- paraschopra 16y ago
  Exactly! A demo will also help.
  - screeley 16y ago
    Demos are now at the bottom of the post. Thanks
    - orblivion 16y ago
      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.
      - arthurgibson 16y ago
        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.
- brandnewlow 16y ago
  Need examples.
  - screeley 16y ago
    We added examples to the Post. Thanks.
- talbina 16y ago
  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/ http://www.sharedy.com/ example. How am I supposed to know if those are not "natural" embeds?
  - talbina 16y ago
    I'm sorry, I just saw your "links into embeds" branding. That should work. Thank you and sorry.
OoTheNigerian 16y ago
I still don't understand what it does. An animation that explains embedly will help you greatly.
- arthurgibson 16y ago
  If you want a quick look, check out http://www.sharedy.com/ 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.
ericz 16y ago
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
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
RyanMcGreal 16y ago
>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. :)
- arthurgibson 16y ago
  Definitely contrasting content, we were trying to convey the broadness of our service.
nopal 16y ago
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.
- arthurgibson 16y ago
  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 http://api.embed.ly/documentation and if you want to promote your site we'll put it up on our developers page.

27 points by arthurgibson 16y ago

talbina 16y ago

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

paraschopra 16y ago
Exactly! A demo will also help.
- screeley 16y ago
  Demos are now at the bottom of the post. Thanks
  - orblivion 16y ago
    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.
    - arthurgibson 16y ago
      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.
brandnewlow 16y ago
Need examples.
- screeley 16y ago
  We added examples to the Post. Thanks.
talbina 16y ago
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/ http://www.sharedy.com/ example. How am I supposed to know if those are not "natural" embeds?
- talbina 16y ago
  I'm sorry, I just saw your "links into embeds" branding. That should work. Thank you and sorry.

OoTheNigerian 16y ago

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

arthurgibson 16y ago
If you want a quick look, check out http://www.sharedy.com/ 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.

ericz 16y ago

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

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

>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. :)

arthurgibson 16y ago
Definitely contrasting content, we were trying to convey the broadness of our service.

nopal 16y ago

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.

arthurgibson 16y ago
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 http://api.embed.ly/documentation and if you want to promote your site we'll put it up on our developers page.