Medium: Embedly is joining Medium

Medium announced today that it has acquired the embed service, Embedly.

Interesting. This is obviously Medium’s way of supporting oEmbeds in their platform, with the addition of statistics and data added to it.

I’ve used Embedly a bit, and it works well, but their Dashboard really still needs work. Medium will probably be a great boon for that development.

SOURCE: https://medium.com/@embedly/embedly-is-joining-medium-7acf54088fd2#.rqtzztyws

Embedded content overall is a great way to encourage more engagement. When my content is shared on another person’s site, I’m more likely to share it. But how will I know that it was embedded there? Embedly doesn’t currently send notifications like that, but if you are on the Medium platform already, I can imagine getting something like “Embed Alerts” could really be beneficial.

That’s part of the power of a hosted publishing platform like Medium. WordPress.com could easily implement something like that. This is different from the “reblog” tool. WordPress.com has a powerful notification area already, and notifying users of embeds of your article on other blogs would be a great feature.

The self-hosted WordPress platform would have to implement something like that as a plugin, but I’m not sure how that would work except that embeds would ping your local API when a post is published.

As the internet gets more and more complex and there are more and more ways to publish content and share content across platforms, these kinds of data notification tools will become more and more necessary and common place. That’s also why an “Open Web” is vital. But I’m getting clearly off topic now… for another post!

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Author: Matt Cromwell

I help product businesses turn customer insight into better experiences that keep people renewing year after year. I co-founded GiveWP, growing it into the leading online donations platform for WordPress. After its acquisition by StellarWP, I became Senior Director of Customer Experience, scaling those same data-driven systems across flagship brands like LearnDash, KadenceWP, and The Events Calendar. Beyond my formal roles, I co-host WP Product Talk, a weekly show where WordPress founders share what works (and what doesn’t) in growing sustainable products. I’ve also spoken at WordCamps and CloudFest EU, helping teams connect customer experience with product strategy so every decision moves the business forward. Over a decade in customer experience and product growth, my focus hasn’t changed: connect what customers feel with how teams build — and turn that alignment into meaningful, measurable growth.

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