What do you bet Twitter at least got approval from those 31 providers? StatSheet is listed as one of Embedly's "supported" providers but they never asked us if we were ok with it. It's not like they are even using an API from us...just scraping.
Embedly is interesting, but this seems like yet another service that really ought to be a client-side Javascript library. I see no advantage to this being a service, besides the fact that the client-side code can be a little thinner.
Besides, if the source was available, it would be trivial to set up your own "Embedly" endpoint, and reap all the benefits of thin client-side code while having control over your infrastructure.
I've been running oohEmbed.com, a similar service, for more than two years now. The problem with doing this in client-side JS is that (a) the oEmbed spec doesn't specify json callbacks so oembed providers don't support callbacks making async stuff in the browser difficult; (b) dealing with SOAP APIs, html parsing, etc. are difficult to say the least within browsers.
But if you really want to do this without relying on an external service, you can take the oohEmbed.com source (BSD licensed) and run it as your own 'private' Google App Engine app. oohEmbed.com itself is App Engine hosted.
If I recall correctly, Embedly offered a patch to Reddit when Reddit open sourced everything that integrated Embedly.
I like this approach for their business model. Instead of pitching to companies about why they should use their service, they show them how they can be integrated.
Is there a download for this so that I can do this stuff server-side without making tons of curl requests to your site? I really don't want to add JavaScript that is going to create tons of further requests (per link on the page).
i.e, is there a URL for an XML file that contains all of the definitions that are in use so that I can cache that and update it once per day and work off the cached copy for processing things server-side?
I realise I can query to see what services that you support, but on a page containing 20 links I'd still have to make 20 separate requests to perform the embeds. So... if I wanted to do this server-side without adding a dependency on a third party service I'd have to call per-link, how could I do it?