We woke up yesterday with smiles on our faces and using our favorite chrome plugin (Parrotfish) . Then we got the news that the #new#new Twitter was released. Jaws dropped, tweets flew in, and profanities flew out. Our users expected results. @hotdogsladies tweeted that lovemaking was just not the same without Embedly. We concur.

For a brief moment we considered retiring Parrotfish. Surely in this latest release Twitter would have implemented embeds the way they should have from the beginning. Lucky for us, it appears to be the same crippled system that caused us to create Parrotfish in the first place.

So, off to the Batcave Sean and Bob went. Afterall, we do our best work with bats circling. Who doesn't? They (Sean and Bob, not the bats) woke up this morning, ready again to tread through the depths of a Twitter re-design, this time armed with some new toys that we have created over the last few months.

We now present to you the latest and greatest Parrotfish ready to conquer your timeline (the Twitter one, not the Facebook one):

•  Enabled with SSL support for embeds and images. (Secure)
•  Better favicons and logos.
• Available in Chrome and Safari. (FF you're next)

Get it right away at Embedly Labs.

Last week we took a break from bug fixing, redesigning, and development. We held our own internal Hack Week: 4 developers, 4 completely different projects, all using or enhancing the Embedly service.

Arthur spent the week adding more social features to Embedly. We want to be able to answer the question: "what's the most popular content on my site?" Arthur developed a Reddit-like voting system for embeds, that get tallied by us and displayed with the rest of our Analytics.

Bob created a web socket proxy for the Embedly API, developed using node.js, because Bob loves node.js. The proxy allows for truly asynchronous requests to the Embedly API, returning embeds as they finish instead of all at once. If anyone is interested, Bob will add documentation when he has some free time, probably during the next Embedly Hack Week.

Sean, the master of Chrome plugins, developed a super top secret Chrome plugin. We could tell you about it, but then we'd have to kill you. Or we could make you sign an NDA, but paperwork is messy.

We sometimes get too focused on business development, answering support tickets, and making sure the servers stay up and running. It's nice every once in a while to take a step back and reap what we've sown. We're constantly surprised with what we've managed to accomplish over the last two years.

We love to hear how others are using the Embedly API. Let us know in comments, and as always, we're available at support@embed.ly with any questions.