Simon Willison’s Weblog

Are there any Meta APIs?

10th December 2011

My answer to Are there any Meta APIs? on Quora

Embed.ly is a good example of this kind of API—it gives you one endpoint which wraps oembed APIs on dozens of other services (plus a bunch of custom scraping code). We use it as part of our video/slide embedding feature on http://lanyrd.com/

Posted 10th December 2011 at 12:29 pm · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol - 9th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations - 7th July 2026
sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) - 5th July 2026

This is Are there any Meta APIs? by Simon Willison, posted on 10th December 2011.

android 13 apis 98 software-engineering 62 web-development 169 quora 1,005 ios 25

Next: What Social Media, marketing events or conferences are taking place between December 24 and December 31 in New York City?

Previous: What are the best practices in Node.js to communicate with an existing Java backend?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe