Imgur is debuting richer embeds today, one that the image-sharing service says “gives you full attribution and copyright control over your content when it’s shared outside of Imgur.”
When you embed content from Imgur, it’ll now come with more detail. This includes the image caption, view count, comments, a nice little Imgur logo, and, most importantly, attribution to the original poster.
According to Imgur, it’s all about making sure OP retains control over his own work.
“The Imgur embed contains the image, the OP and the details that accompany that post. From the embed, viewers will be able to navigate to the full post page. Added bonus? They may even be compelled to throw you an upvote. When you use the embed, the image remains hosted on Imgur and is covered under our copyright policies and processes (which state that the image owner controls the full copyright and permissions to the uploaded image). This means OP keeps all of the control,” says Imgur.
Of course, copyright can only be maintained if it’s OP who owns the copyright in the first place. Plenty of the content posted on Imgur does not originally belong to the poster.
Of course, richer embeds mean more exposure for Imgur. That’s why any site allows you to embed its content on your blog.
Imgur has allowed people to embed images for some time now, but before today the embed lacked any contextual info – they were just images (that linked back to the original Imgur page, to be fair). Imgur’s new embeds do offer the option to strip all of the new detail out of embeds, however, so it’s unclear whether bloggers will choose to include OP and his/her caption in the end.
Embeddable user-generated content has been around for many years now, and it has added a lot of interesting context and value to many articles and blog posts. More types of embeddable content have recently been made available from major web services like Facebook, Twitter, and reddit, so it seemed like a good time to write a post about a bunch of different types of content you can embed in your own posts to make them more interesting.
I’m not saying this will cover all your options, but it certainly gives you quite a few.
Reddit Comments
Reddit announced the ability to embed comments just last week. To use the feature, just go to a comment’s permalink page, click on the “embed” link, and grab the code.
Reddit is a treasure trove of commentary on many subjects, so this feature should be able to add significant value to blog posts. The feature should be priceless for AMAs alone.
Videos are one of the most obvious things to embed, and there’s a ton of video content out there. Just remember it’s not all on YouTube. That said, there’s a ton of great content on YouTube too, and the vast majority can easily be embedded. YouTube has often been called the world’s second largest search engine. That’s because you can search and find content on pretty much any topic. Are you taking advantage of that fact?
While we’re on the subject of video, Facebook just launched video embeds last week at its f8 developer conference. Users have long been able to embed Facebook posts that contain videos, but now, you can just embed the videos themselves. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular place for videos. Often these are videos you won’t find on YouTube or anywhere else.
Twitter also recently launched video embeds. Twitter’s native video offering itself is still relatively new, but earlier this month, they added the embed feature, enabling you to embed the video without the tweet, pretty much like Facebook’s offering.
I’m a big fan of the embeddable Twitter widget. It’s a nice way to display the current conversation around any given topic in real time. Just go to your settings, find the widgets section, and hit “create new”. From there, you’ll be able to create one based on a user timeline, a user’s favorites, tweets from a Twitter list, tweets from a particular search or hashtag, or content from collections.
I use the search widgets in articles fairly often. It’s also nice that they’re customizable.
When you’re done, just hit “create,” and you’ll get your embed code.
WhoSay is a great source of content from celebrities, and posts are embeddable. I would go so far as to say this is among the best places to get Tim Daly content.
Getty Images
Another good place to find embeddable celebrity photos as well as other photography is Getty Images. Just make sure you’re using the content they’re specifically offering up for embedding. About a year ago, Getty announced its embed tool, which lets you search through over 50 million images and share them for free, legally.
Actually, they have a pretty good Tim Daly selection too.
Flickr
Flickr is always another viable option for images:
Imgur
As is Imgur:
Giphy
And Giphy:
Slideshare
While you can certainly upload your own content for embedding, as you can with any of these services, there’s a lot of good content at your disposal on SlideShare. This includes nice image slideshows as well as more informative presentations. Slideshows can’t hurt your time on page metric either.
Infographics that companies put out often come with embed codes attached to them. They’re made for people to share on their websites, so this makes it easier to do so.
Scribd
Scribd is good for when you want to embed documents. It’s often used by publications covering lawsuits and other legal proceedings, for example.
Maybe you want to embed some audio. SoundCloud makes this easy.
Spotify
Spotify doesn’t make it quite as easy, but you can still do it. They used let you right-click on a song and get embed code. Now, it looks like you have to use the Play Button generator. To do that, right-click on the song, and copy the URL. Then go to the generator tool, paste the link in where it tells you, and it will give you the code.
As you can see above, the embeds themselves do give you an embed option, so others can grab the code from there.
Google/Bing Maps
You can always embed maps from Google or Bing, should the occasion call for it. For Google, find a place, and click the gear icon at the bottom to get to the embed option.
For Bing, you can find the embed option in the “Share” button at the top.
Also, look at that drunk idiot guy who’s clearly tripping balls.
It’s smart and streamlined, and should get people more excited about sharing Facebook videos – as opposed to YouTube, for instance. We all know how important video is to Facebook’s current and future strategy. At today’s f8 developers conference, Mark Zuckerberg said that there are over three billion video views a day.
Currently, if you want to rebroadcast a tweet and provide your own commentary, there are two ways to do it.
First, you can copy the tweet, add ‘RT’ in front of it, and provide your commentary either before or after the tweet. Or, you can tweet out a link to said tweet, which forces users to jump around between your tweet and the context tweet.
Both of these are inherently clunky, so a new test that allows users to embed tweets in their own tweets is more than welcome.
Apparently being tested in Twitter’s iOS and Android apps, the new feature transforms any tweet URL into a clean, concise embed inside the tweet. Here’s what it looks like:
Neat, huh?
Twitter tests new features all the time, and there’s always a chance that this could be abandoned – but not likely. This is a very nice solution to a long-running problem on Twitter.
Do you have the ability to embed tweets in your own tweets?
In an effort to spread its presence across the web, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has finally launched web embeds. Starting today, you can embed any public photo (or stream of photos) on your blog or site.
Yes, only publicly shared photos – Flickr isn’t allowing people to just embed private photos, so don’t worry.
Also, it’s not just a single photo we’re talking about. If a photo is part of a set, Flickr’s embed box will let readers cycle through all the photos in the set (in the highest quality, of course):
“Flickr Web Embeds are contextual and interactive! If you’ve embedded a photo from a set, photostream or group, people will be able to browse through the whole collection. Because Flickr is dedicated to high-quality, full-resolution images, we are also offering a magnificent full-screen viewing experience for the photos on your site. We’ll never compress or resize your images,” says Flickr’s Daniel Elba.
All you have to do to embed Flickr photos on your site is click the “share” button in the right-hand side menu, select the button, and choose your size. After that, just copy and paste the embed code and you’re done.
As you can see, Flickr’s embeds contain full attribution. Flickr will also keep track of views garnered from your photo’s placement on another site, “so you get a sense for how popular your photos really are.”
Twitter has just made an update to the way embedded tweets with photos look on websites, and the goal is to “put the photo front and center, with a bigger and bold visual focus on the media.”
Until today, embedded tweets that contained photos would appear with the actual text of the tweet on top, with the attached photo displayed under the text. Now, Twitter has moved the photos to the top and extended them to reach all the way across the tweet. Like this:
Good morning! Perspective – Sunday is a fine day to go for a walk with a friend. pic.twitter.com/P3uDfjYsEU
As you can see, the focus is now on the photo itself, not the text of the tweet. This change is retroactive, meaning that all tweets that are embedded on old articles around the web sport this new look.
The expanded look now appears for both photos in landscape and portrait orientation.
Google made a couple of noteworthy Google+ announcements today with Google+ Sign-In integration with Authorship and embedded posts.
Now when you use Google+ Sign-in to log in to a blog, your work will automatically be connected with your profile, the way content you’ve marked up is.
“So if you sign in to WordPress.com with Google, for instance, the articles you publish will now be associated with your Google+ profile automatically,” says Google+ Director of Product Management, Seth Sternberg. “With this association in place, we can look for ways to surface your info when it’s most relevant. For example, today users may see your name, picture and/or a link to your Google+ profile when your content appears in Search, News and other Google products.”
The feature is being piloted immediately with WordPress and Typepad, but Google is also working with other sites like About.com, WikiHow and Examiner. It will then expand the pilot to more sites and apps.
Twitter has had embedded posts for quite some time, and Facebook has had them since last month (at least for everyone). It was only a matter of time before Google+ followed suit. Frankly, it’s a little surprising it didn’t have it from the beginning, considering the feature has long been a staple of Google’s YouTube, and Google+ has always catered to a more Twitter-like public sharing environment (as opposed to a more private Facebook-like environment), even with its Circles privacy options.
“With embedded posts, site owners can now add your public Google+ posts to their web pages — as a primary source, for example, or to highlight your point of view,” Google says. “Text, photo and media posts are all supported, and the embeds are fully interactive, so visitors can +1, comment and follow you inline.”
It only works with public posts. You’ll find the embed option in the drop-down menu for the post.
Instagram has just announced that they are now allowing photo and video embeds – something that the service has needed for as long as it’s been around. Now, anyone wishing to embed a photo or video in an article for their blog or website will be able to do so with an automatically generated embed code, now available via a new share button beside Instagram content on the web.
That’s if the photo/video is public, of course. You won’t be able to embed private content. Here’s what the new share button will look like:
“As always, you own your photos and videos, and we want to make sure that’s understood no matter where your content appears. Whether you want to embed your video on your blog or a friend wants to feature your photo on a website, everyone will clearly see that your content belongs to you. Your embedded photo or video appears with your Instagram username, and clicking on the Instagram logo will take people to your page on Instagram.com where they can discover more of your photos and videos.”
Finally, Instagram allows people to add content to their blogs with ease. No more screencapping. For Instagram, it’s a no-brainer – it spreads their content across the vast reaches of the web.
Twitter appears to be testing a new feature that will provide users with a way to view popular tweets in better context by pointing them in the direction of articles where those tweets have been embedded.
The new “embedded on these websites” feature, only being seen by some users, appears just below the tweet and links to sites where the tweet has been embedded. It’s as simple as that. For instance, check out this tweet from the White House that had been used in articles from CNN, ABC News, and more:
Twitter first launched embeddable tweets back in December of 2011. But this is the first time that tweets have contained information on where they are embedded across the web.
This is an interesting feature, one that will hopefully help users find more information and context on individual tweets. For websites, this could be a new way to send Twitter users to their way. Let’s say a tweet catches your eye, but you don’t really understand its significance of simply wish to learn more about why it may be important. You look down and see that the tweet was featured in a NYT article. And there you go – context.
Today, Vine has finally made their six-second videos embeddable across the web. They’ve also updated their iOS app to allow for embedding (as well as the ability to share other people’s Vines on Facebook and Twitter).
“When we launched Vine, we described posts as ‘little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.’ With today’s update, you can display them almost anywhere,” says Vine.
When you reach the embed screen, you can choose your size as well as two modes – simple mode and postcard mode.
Simple embeds simply show the Vine, with the pertinent information like user, description, hashtags, etc. shown when you hover.
Postcard mode shows all of that info in a white frame around the Vine video:
In order to embed a Vine via the iOS app, tap on the “…” button within any Vine video. Click “share this post” and then finally “embed.” you’ll get an email with the code, which will take you to the embed page. Make your size and mode selections and there you go. Copy the code and put it up on your site. It’s not exactly without its annoyances, but it’s about as easy as embedding on through an app could be.
You can embed your own Vines, or anyone else’s Vine as long as they’ve already shared it on Facebook or Twitter.
Today, Twitter announced a major redesign that is currently rolling out to users. According to their blog, the new design is more streamlined with four new tabs that emphasize discovery. You can read more about the update here.
Along with these design changes, Twitter is also unveiling the ability for developers and bloggers to easily embed tweets, simply by clicking a link on the particular tweet’s permalink page.
“Every Tweet has a story that’s more than just 140 characters. It has an author, mentions @people and #topics, contains media, and has actions you can use to share or join the conversation. It’s a dynamic piece of media, and we believe that everyone should be able to view and interact with Tweets on the Web in the same ways you would from any Twitter client,” said Twitter’s Brian Ellin in a blog post.
Here’s what the new option will look like on the individual tweets:
And here’s the lightbox that will pop up. It allows for a little bit of customization and provides the full HTML code for the tweet as well as the shortcode (for applicable platforms) and the simple URL:
Finally, here’s how the embedded tweet will look on your site:
The embedded tweets will allow you to reply, retweet and favorite them as well as follow the tweeter directly from the third-party site.
