> Open APIs, that's what you need. Well I agree in principle, but I also agree with you that the big guys aren't going to offer APIs. And even if they were, I

> Open APIs, that's what you need. Well I agree in principle, but I also agree with you that the big guys aren't going to offer APIs. And even if they were, I think if you rely on some API you are going to be shut down in the long term (remember all those Twitter clients that were using the now defunct Twitter API?). So, I think the way to go is to base everything on embeds. They are never going to get rid of the ability to embed posts/videos/tweets because it brings more traffic to their sites. You still need a bit of scraping, in case the service in question doesn't have RSS (Youtube does for example). And yes, with scraping they will try and make your life impossible (dynamic class names etc. to make scraping hard), but you would only need it for discovering the URL of new posts/tweets/videos, and nothing else.