Quite a while ago we added support for oEmbed in both 23 Video and 23 Photo Sharing. This makes it easy to turn a URL from either service into a piece of HTML which is can be embedded into a web site or a blog. For example, this makes it easy to embed video into a WordPress blog post by simply pasting a link to a video into your editor.

I won’t dig too deeply into the technical stuff since there isn’t much to say: oEmbed allows a URL or a link to be turned into a full piece of HTML in a structured fashion. On 23 Photo Sharing the oEmbed endpoint is http://www.23hq.com/23/oembed and on 23 Video it is http://your.domain.com/oembed.

Now, from WordPress 2.9 and onwards you can use oEmbed in your blog posts. For example, you can put in http://www.23hq.com/steffen/photo/5672108 into your editor and have it be displayed not as a link, but as a photo scaled to fit your design. For administrators of WordPress sites this trick is also a way to control which content can safely be embedded into posts — even if you don’t allow <embed>, <object> or , <img> tags in posts.

To set this up, you’ll need to add a little piece of code to your WordPress installation; for example in the bottom of .wp-includes/media.php. For 23 Photo Sharing this line is:

wp_oembed_add_provider(‘http://www.23hq.com/*’, ‘http://www.23hq.com/23/oembed’ );

For 23 Video the code line varies with the domain you’ve chosen for your video site, but something like this would do the trick:

wp_oembed_add_provider(‘http://tv.dmi.dk/*’, ‘http://tv.dmi.dk/oembed’ );

After this a video from the site you’ve set up is embedded simply by inserting a link into your blog post.

You probably didn’t notice this, but in the mad rush to get VideoDay up and running last Thursday we also managed to relaunch the 23 Video product site and our company web site with a new design and a some nice new information.
First, the 23video.com has been upgraded with much more information about the platform’s features, about our many wonderful partners and some of the best examples on how organizations are using 23 Video (if you’re not on the list, go to our new inspiration site, Act Visually, and tell us what you’re up to…).

We’ve also revamped the support section of the site. It now includes video guides to the most important administrative tasks on 23 Video along with succinct instructions on how to prepare, upload, track and organize your content.

For the developers, designers and creatively inclined people out there, we’ve set up 23 Developer. Here you’ll learn how to style, mash up and extend 23 Video sites. We’ve added introductions, detailed guides, examples, sample code and detailed API documentation on the site — and a forum where you can ask the community for guidance when our documentation falls short.

The future of video on the internet changed yesterday when Google launched The WebM Project and open sourced the VP8 codec. Effectively this puts us on a trajectory where broad support for browser-native video (usually called HTML5 video, which is a terrible term) will be a reality in about 6-9 months. That is huge.

For the geeks in the audience, Robert Nyman has a nice recap of the current state of things and Jason Garrett-Glaser goes into exhaustive detail with the codec.

Can I upload WebM and VP8 to 23 Video?

Yes, we have already added support for WebM and VP8. So you can upload the new format to your 23 Video site and it’ll work perfectly.

Will you switch all your content to WebM?

No, but we’re committed to bringing video to the web, and we’re committed to HTML5 video (see, terrible term). Today, this is achieved with H.264 and Flash combined with HTML5 where Flash isn’t available (for example, on the iPhone and iPad).

As the web and the world of web video evolves, 23 Video will too — so today we’re committing to extend support for WebM and browser-native playback.

(This project internally, by the way, is called Eingebaut and we’ll be doing a Request For Comments-type session in June for developers to ensure its technical foundation. Also, I’ll probably be showing off the prototype at VideoDay, which is shaping up nicely.)

Two simple take-aways

First, 23 Video now supports WebM and VP8: You can upload .webm files and have them played and distributed with 23 Video. Second, we’re committing to support video playback in both H.264 and VP8 very soon through the mysterious Eingebaut project.

We’re just back from a nice week in Berlin where we visited the re:publica conference and met with nice people. We shot a bit a video (with berliner backgrounds) showcasing some of the geeky stuff we’re working on for 23 Video. Here I am talking about some of the challenges of purely browser-based video playback (and of course, how we’ll solve that in an awesome and timely fashion):

Mark said it on Friday: We absolutely adore HTML5, and the prospect of delivering great-quality, speedy video directly in your browser without using Flash has us thinking unpure thoughts here at 23. (There are plenty of reasons why we’re not quite there yet. I won’t dive into the details, but if you want me to drag you in to that vortex, just ask…)

We’ve actually used HTML <video> for a while in the mobile version of 23 Video, but today we’re beginning to test wider adoption of the possibilities. To do this testing, we’ve enabled HTML5 video on a few sites including Reboot and Madbio. In practice this means that you will be able to play video in most modern browsers and mobile devices even if there’s no Flash installed — this includes Safari, Google Chrome and the iPad.

We’ll be beta testing these new features for a few weeks before rolling it out to all customers — but if you want iPad and HTML5 video support now, drop us a mail or ping us on Twitter.

A few days ago, we asked you to test the new comments section we’d been working on. Now, we’ve made about nine or ten extra tweaks based on the feedback and the new comments section is online on 23 Video. The upgrade includes better spam protection, it features buddy icons from Gravatar, it is faster — and (at least to our fingertips) it feels a lot better. And then there’s integration with Facebook Connect.

Connecting and posting to Facebook

I don’t want to bore anyone the details of Connect (and if you’re familiar with the interwebs, this probably isn’t the first you’re hearing of it…), but it is basically a way for Facebook users to use their profiles elsewhere on the web. In this case, Connect will let users link their Facebook profiles to comments posted on a 23 Video site. This means that they won’t need to key in their name and contact information, that they’ll have their buddy icons posted alongside their comment — and, most importantly, users can re-post their comments on their Facebook walls.

When a user re-posts a comment to Facebook, we’ll even attach your video for playback directly on the user’s wall in order to drive more traffic back to your video site.

We’ll reveal a few more Facebook tricks over the coming weeks, so there’s no link to activate the feature under Distribution yet. If you want to use it on your site though, go to http://your.domain.com/distribution/facebook-app to set it up.

And also… the default buddy icon

When there’s no icon to show for a commenter, we’ll display a simple, default buddy icon. The default icon will change over the coming days (it’s a little generic for our tastes), but you can also set up your own default icon. Simply upload a (quadratic) file called no-buddy.gif under Design → Files to add a little of your own flavour.

I’ve fallen into a bit of a black hole of development these past few days. Usually, we’re pretty focused on bringing you guys new features, but this week I’ve dedicated way too much time to make an existing 23 Video feature bet…. Well, I was going to say ‘better’, but let’s settle for ‘different’ for now.

I’ve never loved how comments work on 23 Video. Feature-wise they’re pretty awesome — you’ll get three different kinds of spam-protection, content monitoring, post-editing, notifications and more. But comments on 23 Video and Visualblog have always felt — well — wrong. In fact, the comment feature on 23 Photo Sharing just feels better, so I wanted to duplicate some of that feeling. (And, I’ll admit it, add a few extra features just to have something to tell the PR people upstairs: “No no no, the code monkeys aren’t wasting time down here. We’re building the future!”)

After days of tweaking, I still only have a prototype. It does all the same stuff you’ll know from 23 Video: You’ll still be writing your name and email alongside the comment; there’s still different spam-protection mechanisms in the browser; and there’s still a spam filter on the back-end. You can still get notifications and you can still delete a comment after it’s been posted. I’ve removed comment editing though, and there’s no threading or quoting.

There’s some new goodies as well: To lessen the burden of handling spam, users are now asked to complete a captcha to submit a comment flagged by the spam filters. We’ll be displaying user icons from Gravatar alongside comments. And it integrates with Facebook Connect. So you can log in using Facebook to avoid filling in name and email, and you can post a comment to your wall on Facebook.

So far, it’s all just a prototype — none of these improvement have made it into 23 Video yet. Before we go that far, I wanted to ask you: How does the new comment form feel to you?

Try out The Comment Form Prototype and post your impressions here. (And please, please, please. Don’t just try to comment. Try to break it.)

We have a scheduled service window tonight between 12.30am and 1.30am for both 23 Video and 23 Photo Sharing due to some software upgrades. This will result in the web services becoming unavailable for a short while, but we expect a maximum of 10 minutes of total downtime.

Update: The maintenance was completed at about 12.50am (CET), and everything is back up after 9 minutes of downtime. We know you were all holding your breath in anticipation, but it’s alright to relax now.

more photos from andjohan

This is one of my favorite photos of the year. Taken by andjohan of mr. Moltke after our joint Christmas party with our friends from Socialsquare.