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.

Tom spent the week developing a Flipboard clone, using Embedly. The iPad app connects to Facebook, pulls a user's news feed, sends that through the Embedly API using our iOS library, and displays the results. Tom really lucked out by finding the FlipView project on Github. That made it almost too easy to lay out the resulting embeds in a Flipboard-like experience.

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.