Goodbye oohEmbed

22 Jun 2011 · #projects · #techtalk

I launched oohEmbed.com around three years ago shortly after the oEmbed spec was announced. Initially, it was just an excuse to play with Google App Engine and Dumble - my old delicious.com powered tumblelog.

But what started as an experiment slowly grew into a very popular web-service with hundreds of users and a truckload of traffic. So much so that for quite some time now, App Engine’s free quota was no longer sufficient to serve oohEmbed! I turned on billing for the app while trying to figure out how to sustain the project.

In the end, for various reasons, I decided that it was best to find a new owner for the site. Luckily, Embedly came forward to take over. They are a company built on the idea of making embedding content from various sites easy - exactly what oohEmbed was meant for! With their resources behind oohEmbed, I thought oohEmbed’s users would be better served.

I am happy to announce that starting today, oohEmbed has found a new home at Embedly. You can read the announcement on their blog and also reach out to them at support@embed.ly with any questions that you may have.

The oohEmbed source code that I wrote will continue to be available in its Google Code repository. I encourage you to fork it and host your own instance on App Engine! If you don’t like App Engine, you should still be able to run it in any environment that can host Python WSGI apps with just minor changes.

Thanks to everyone who used oohEmbed over the years and I hope you’ll find Embedly great to work with.