Flickr, Viddler, Qik, Pownce and Revision3 are the first services to support oEmbed, an easy way to allow embeding media from a certain URL in a third party site.
From the oEmbed site:
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.
This means that if you for example find a nice photo on flickr, you can take the URL and easily turn it into embed-able data:
Original URL: http://flickr.com/photos/codepo8/2475016321/
oEmbed URL: http://flickr.com/services/oembed?url=http://flickr.com/photos/codepo8/2475016321/
Result:
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<oembed>
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<version>1.0</version>
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<type>photo</type>
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<title>? too much myspace error</title>
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<author_name>codepo8</author_name>
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<author_url>http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/</author_url>
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<cache_age>3600</cache_age>
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<provider_name>Flickr</provider_name>
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<provider_url>http://www.flickr.com/</provider_url>
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<width>500</width>
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<height>375</height>
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<url>
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http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95.jpg
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</url>
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</oembed>
You can define the output format and the maximum width and height with URL parameters:
oEmbed URL:
Result:
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{
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version: '1.0',
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type: 'photo',
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title: '? too much myspace error',
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author_name: 'codepo8',
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author_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/photos/codepo8/',
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cache_age: '3600',
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provider_name: 'Flickr',
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provider_url: 'http://www.flickr.com/',
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width: '100',
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height: '75',
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url: 'http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3128/2475016321_982666ec95_t.jpg'
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}
Supported formats for responses so far are photo, video, link and rich.