After our call to open source developers on Monday and the addition of our code repository to github, we've been ecstatic to see a flurry of activity in #reddit-dev on freenode as well as on our mailing list. We'd like to announce that our most recent accepted patch is from the gentlemen at a YCombinator start-up called embed.ly who, as you might have guessed, specialize in providing embeddable media using the open oEmbed standard. When a link gets submitted to reddit, within a few minutes of it appearing on the new page, we run it through a "media scraper" which is responsible for finding images to generate a thumbnail for the link as well as for finding any embedible content (such as videos). Unfortunately, each provider generates their embed codes a little differently, and it has been cumbersome to keep our scrapers up to date.
Enter embed.ly. They've got quite the list of supported content providers, and gave us the advantage of not needing to keep a long and tangled list of how to deal with each API individually. Rather than simply pitch us that it was a good idea to work with them on this, they grabbed our source and wrote us a new scraper which we could drop right in. Not only does this free us up from having to keep track of changing embed APIs, it allows new APIs to be taken advantage of automatically. For this, in addition to getting our thanks for simplifying our lives, screeley and agibby get their awards.
Their contributions aren't yet reflected in the repository because, as you may have noticed, the repository is still a little bit behind our production branch. We're sorry about that, and we're going to merge up next week as we have a bunch of long term projects coming to a conclusion. In addition to the new media scraper, the updated version will include our move to Cassandra, the new spam control measures, and all of our new sponsored link code.
TLDR: open source is great, and embed.ly has helped us double the number of sites our media scraper knows about (so you can watch more videos from more sources in reddit by clicking the play button).
