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oEmbed for Kiva Loans

November 9, 2010

If you're an avid Twitter user, you may have already noticed Kiva loans popping up in your timeline. So now even Twitter's using the Kiva API? Sorta… we actually created a new web service just for our friends across SoMA, but it's based on an open standard that anyone can use. It's called oEmbed and it looks like this: http://www.kiva.org/services/oembed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kiva.org%2Flend%2F99871&format=jsonPass in any Kiva URL and we'll return an embeddable object (HTML, image, etc.) if it's available. You can detect if a page is embeddable by checking for a LINK tag in the HEAD of the html document with type application/json+oembed. Currently, only loans are embeddable and they're rendered as HTML similar to the example below.

Kiva - Loans that change lives
Barham Diong's Loan

Country: Senegal

Loan Use: To increase his working capital

Loan Request:$425

Status:Paying Back


Mr. Barham Diong is a young, 24-year-old man who lives in the rural community of Bambilor. He is single and doesn't have any children. For over a year, Mr. Diong has been involved in buying and selling agricultural products such as seeds, insecticides, etc. He benefited from the experience of his older brother, who is in the same business. He eventually opened a shop to make it on his own. This activity allows him to earn a living. He has been a member of the Bambilor credit union since June 2010 but had not received any credit until now. He is requesting a loan of 200,000 francs to increase his stocks by purchasing merchandise (insecticides, fertilizers, seeds). The boost in his profits will enable him to better support himself, and especially to bolster his savings… Learn more about Barham Diong's Loan

For more information, check out the official oEmbed specification.