

One API to Rule them All (Embed.ly) - geez
http://api.embed.ly/

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DanBlake
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.

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fookyong
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?

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seancron
It can also be useful for very useful for aggregators.

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

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fookyong
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!).

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edash
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.

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dotBen
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.

