YouTube has pretty much got the video market sewn up at the moment but they could have a 300 million tonne problem on the horizon if Facebook decides to put them in their cross hairs. Facebook has been slowly improving the quality of their videos and HD is now standard across the site with millions of people sharing their videos with friends on the social network but up until now it has been a pretty big walled garden with the best content staying on Facebook. I am by no means technically minded but even I was able to “steal” a video from Facebook and embed it here on the blog…

2 Clues that Facebook about to allow embedding of videos

1.The first is that the video features a watermark in the top left hand corner. This does not appear when you watch videos on the website itself so this suggests that Facebook either knows people are embedding their videos (generally they are not) or they are about to let us all embed videos.
2.When you watch the video above to the end you are presented with the following screen. You will notice the “go to video” button as one of the options, This also doesn’t appear when you watch videos on the site.

Can you imagine the endless social possibilities around being able to embed this in your site? Friends wouldn’t even need to log in to comment on your video or like it or to send it to their own feed. For all of Youtube’s strenghts it has never been very strong at the social side of things and interaction has been limited pretty much to comments. Facebook could be about to change all of that by adding one simple embed code and blowing the video sharing market wide open, they certainly have the numbers!

How to embed Facebook videos on your site right now

Use a greasemonkey script

You can now get a Firefox Add on that will allow you to embed, download and convert Facebook videos. It displays links on the pages where the videos appear but it can be a bit temperamental at times.

A Piece Of Code

Simply grab the video number form the URL and then replace the xxx in the code below with that number and then use the embed code below as you would normally. Change the width and height as desired.

<object width="400" height="224" >
 <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
 <param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" />
 <param name="movie" value="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx" />
 <embed src="http://www.facebook.com/v/xxx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
   allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="400" height="224">
 </embed>
</object>

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