The veil has come down, the storefront is up and Embedly Pro is open for business.

Over the last 2 months, we have been beta testing Pro with a number of companies and individual users. We have seen some pretty cool integrations and feel confident enough to open it up to the world. So let's talk users, features, pricing and sign up.

Features

api.embed.ly can be restrictive for a number of reasons. URLs have to validate against a large Reg Ex, there are a limited number of providers and it's a shared resource. We wanted to fix all that with Pro.

Pro lets you request any URL and will return the relevant meta data associated with that URL. It may be a video, image, PDF, rich media, RSS entry or just an excerpt and thumbnail. The important thing is that you can provide a preview for any URL, giving context to your users and creating a richer experience. Let's outline a few of these features.

New Endpoints

We added two new endpoints: Preview and Objectify.

The Preview endpoint was built to allow users to customize embeds. This endpoint is for you if you are building something similar to the Facebook Share preview functionality. It gives the user multiple images, objects and embeds to choose from when creating an embed.

The Objectify endpoint is the kitchen sink. This endpoint will pass back everything we know about a URL. It is not as well structured as the previous endpoints and is only available to supplement those with desires we could not imagine. Enjoy!

RSS Entries

Embedly Pro ingests hundreds of RSS feeds each day. Don't just show your users previews, show them full text articles. We use PubHubSubBub and the canonical meta tags to match a blog post RSS entry with a URL. We don't poll. PubHubSubBub allows us to take in content from feeds and add it to our meta data.

Malware and Phishing Detection

For Pro we've implemented Google's Safe Browsing API. Google is constantly updating their blacklisted URLs and we wanted to harness that information for our customers. With Safe Browsing integration we can inform a user that the URL they are about to click on is potentially dangerous.

Analytics

What are the most popular URLs on my site? What domains are my users linking to the most? Embedly tracks every URL that you request and breaks them down by day, hour and minute. Embedly gives you insight into what your users are watching, listening to and interested in.

When you work at a small startup, every employee matters.  When you need support from a small startup, you end up speaking with each one of them. We want you to be able to put a face to every name you hear from regarding a support request or on Twitter. With that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to our newest, but not so new employee, Bob.

Bob joined us about 2 months ago to work on our backend systems. He has moved us to Chef, Membase, Nagios, Munin and completely overhauled our deployment systems. He has rewritten our locking code, added rss feeds and generally helped us create a more stable system. So what does that mean for you? Uptime.

I fired up Pingdom today to look at our uptime and response times. I was happy with what I saw. In October, our uptime was %99.11 with 6 hours and 35 minutes of downtime. This was before Bob started and awful for an API company. Last month our uptime was %99.79 with 40 minutes of downtime. Not exactly where we want to be, but much better. Our average response time also decreased 2 fold from October to December. This and the number of embeds we serve on api.embed.ly has doubled.

Needless to say, we are happy to have Bob and you should be too. Currently he's working on the Ruby library for Embedly Pro, so all you Ruby fanboys will have a lot more interaction with him.

You can find Bob here:

• http://twitter.com/doki_pen
• bob@embed.ly
• http://www.google.com/profiles/rcorsaro

We have added a bunch of new providers to ring in 2011. If you didn't get what you wanted during your prospective holiday, we hope this brings you joy.

(download)

Click here to download:

brand-new-providers-for-2011-kbHrgJoHphuybDwahgjH.zip (70 KB)

Let's list them off:

• Google Profiles - This is pretty cool. You can embed a little bio and your list of favorite sites used. Follow this pattern: http://google.com/profiles/<google openID> .  Tom's profile
• Formspring.me - A Q&A with your friends. Embed your favorite answers!  Try it out
• Twitlonger.com - Want extended tweets? They are now available in the API.   @wikileaks Twitlonger
• NextNewNetworks.com - Provides video networks like hungrynation.tv, barelypolitical.com and vodcars.com.   Crush on Obama LP

As an added bonus, these all work in the Parrotfish plugin! 

Enjoy. Contact support@embed.ly with any requests.

Today there has been a flurry of activity concerning whether or not RSS is dead, making it the perfect day to launch our latest addition to our suite of tools.  We, for one, don't think it's dead. It just needs to be repurposed.

Legacy dictates a lot of what we do as developers. Once something has caught hold and become the norm, we build on it and try our hardest not to let it die. Because with it dies all the apps and services that rely on it.

One such legacy, the RSS Reader, has been used since the age of dinosaurs to poll blogs for their latest articles and pull them into one organized place for you to consume. No context switching. No remembering to check 50 blogs a day for any new updates.  Just content. It's time consuming, however, and after a while it becomes unmanageable. There is just too much unfiltered news streaming into one place. For many people, like me, Twitter has replaced most of the functionality of a reader. I still get the same information, but it's pushed to me, nicely curated, by people I follow. But oh how I miss the content sometimes. 

When we boil these two technologies down, we are really looking at a bunch of links that the end user can choose to view however they want. RSS isn't new and at this point, neither is Twitter. What's innovative these days is how that content is being displayed. Flipboard is a prime example here. Mobile devices are changing how we think about content anyhow. Why not follow their lead?

So wouldn't it be great if we could take the best parts of RSS (i.e. the content) and repurpose it so we could embed the post anywhere the link appeared? 

Well, we did. Embedly Pro now supports embedded RSS entries. This allows the publisher to dictate what part of their content is consumed. We aren't guessing what image to pull or what the excerpt should be. The publisher has already made that decision for us.

To see what we are talking about download the Parrotfish extension available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (via twitter.com). You will be able to read RSS articles in the right hand detail panel for sites like Techcrunch, Read Write Web, Lifehacker and Mashable.

(download)

Click here to download:

rss-isn-t-dead-it-just-needs-to-be-repurposed-gwxtzDvuIxEBptklFdrk.zip (840 KB)

On the technical side, we use pubhubsubbub and the canonical meta tags to match a blog post RSS entry with a URL. We don't poll. Pubhubsubbub allows us to take in content from feeds and go from there. We are starting small, with a few feeds, but we hope to expand to many more soon. In the future we will allow any blog with an RSS feed to be added.