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May 9, 2008
Web 2.0 is all about collaboration, distribution and personal configuration and probably one of the biggest traffic drivers of social networks like Facebook or MySpace are videos and photos being sent to and from your contacts.
The problem for developers of networks is that you don't want people to leave your application to see a photo or a video, which means that you need a way to only get the media and embed that. Normally this happens using the media provider's API or - if they don't offer one - screen scraping (loading the whole document and programatically finding and extracting the media).
oEmbed is a great idea to work around that issue:
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly.
Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed which means you can easily access photos and videos with a simple URL.
Say for example find a nice photo on flickr:
Original URL:
oEmbed URL:
Result:
<oembed>
<version>1.0</version>
<type>photo</type>
<title>? too much myspace error</title>
<author_name>codepo8</author_name>
<author_url>http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/</author_url>
<cache_age>3600</cache_age>
<provider_name>Flickr</provider_name>
<provider_url>http://www.flickr.com/</provider_url>
<width>500</width>
<height>375</height>
<url>
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95.jpg
</url>
</oembed>
You can define the output format and the maximum width and height with URL parameters:
oEmbed URL:
Result:
{
version: '1.0',
type: 'photo',
title: '? too much myspace error',
author_name: 'codepo8',
author_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/',
cache_age: '3600',
provider_name: 'Flickr',
provider_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/',
width: '100',
height: '75',
url: 'http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95_t.jpg'
}
Supported formats for responses so far are photo, video, link and rich.
Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network
Posted at May 9, 2008 4:51 AM
This is a brilliant idea! Solves the exact problem I've been looking at recently.
Is there any backend "best practice" example for php? I will write a way to parse the response, but wondered if there existed a method that sticks to the spec accurately.
Hopefully this will be adopted by more websites quickly! Well done for getting it out to Flickr to get the ball rolling. Yahoo really seems to be innovating recently - Google is starting to look a little old fashioned!
Posted by: Rich at May 9, 2008 11:35 AM
Rich - there's work going on to make a PHP PEAR module to do all the heavy lifting. I expect it'll be posted at oembed.com in the not too distant future.
Posted by: Cal at May 9, 2008 2:00 PM
While there is definitely a need for what is being provided by oEmbed, it seems the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Most of this could be accomplished in a much more straightforward manner, using REST guidelines.
I've laid out my thoughts on the matter here:
http://www.backdrifter.com/2008/05/09/oembed-fail-represent-restfully/
I'd be interested in further discussion. Specifically around the need for an oEmbed API endpoint.
Posted by: Jared Hanson at May 9, 2008 3:23 PM
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