In a recent announcement, Facebook said that they are no longer supporting the ability to embed posts on your website without having jump through massive hoops (signing up for a developer account and a bunch of other stuff that just makes it really hard).
This is yet another example of why relying too heavily on social media can be a dangerous game. They can change the rules to suit themselves and there’s nothing you can do about it. Okay, I’m back off my soapbox now.
Here’s what they’re breaking:
Transcript
It’s auto-generated, so it’s probably safer to watch the video 🙂
So Facebook made an announcement a few days ago that could actually break quite a bit of stuff on your website. What is that announcement? Let’s have a look at that today.
Now that change that Facebook has just announced I saw on WordPress Tavern the other day. So let’s have a quick look now at what they say here.
So Facebook and Instagram will be dropping unauthenticated oEmbed support on October 24 which is a bit nerdy. But basically what that means is that in the past you were able to copy the address or the URL of a particular post on Facebook or Instagram and just flip back to your website in WordPress for example, paste that address in, and it would automatically convert it to something that looks a bit like this here. So there we go. That’s an embedded Facebook post and all I’ve done is grabbed the address from that off Facebook.com, pasted into there and the oEmbed geeky code in the background turned it into that. And Facebook is stopping that from happening, unless you need to sign up for… Where did that go? Yeah, by October 24 developers, developers must leverage a user app or client token when create querying api… Yada yada. Basically, you’ve got to create a developer account with Facebook and jump through a whole bunch of hoops.
It’s not a simple thing. Kind of defeats the purpose because the idea of oEmbed was it was nice and simple. Anybody could copy the address, paste that line of code in the website.
And they were done. It worked. That is not happening anymore. Who knows why they’ve changed this? But if you’re like me and you’ve got Facebook and Instagram posts embedded on pages like this example before, after 24th of October, they’re just going to stop working unless you jump through a whole bunch of hopes and you have to wonder whether it’s worth the effort.
Now, if you are embedding videos on your website, youtube still works fine vimeo still works fine. Lots of other services work fine.
This’s really just affecting what facebook and instagram of doing so. If you have used this technique before, after the 24th of october, you’re going to need a plan b and expect everywhere that you’ve done this is going to stop working after that date.
So there’s wonderful news for you for a Monday morning. I’m Jason Foss. Thanks for watching.