Facebook allows you to embed videos

For years now it has been standard practice when you launch a video hosting/sharing site that you allow the videos to be embedded outside of the site. This is obviously for a few reasons.

• Place videos on your own site/blog and allow users who are not on the hosting site to see the video.
• Publicise the video sharing/hosting site.

So why is it that MySpace, Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube and all the other sites have offered it since day one, but Facebook hasn’t? It may well have been because they wanted anyone who sees a video to login to Facebook, watch the video and after that they might get addicted!

But now Facebook have allowed the official embed code to be used outside of the main site. For a while now you could use a grease monkey script to embed Facebook videos on your own site.

So now when you upload a video you get an option to embed a code, just like all the other sites. Along with just embedding public videos it also takes along with other permissions. For instance only allowing your friends to view the video etc. I assume that flash can read cookies or some other authentication method to see if you are allowed to read a video.

Facebook has about 100,000 videos uploaded every day, which is a lot less than YouTube, but this slight modification will hopefully decrease the gap between Facebook and the other video sharing sites. What do you think? Is Facebook spreading itself too thin?

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