How to enable thumbnail selection for external links? (or: reproduce Facebook's "post to profile" functionality)

Question

When posting a link to your facebook profile, users are presented with the option to choose a thumbnail to represent the link, as seen in the following example:

http://www.everyday.com.my/photo/2009/4/Add-Sushi-King-into-my-Facebook-profile.jpg (New users aren't allowed to embed images)

The thumbnails presented to the user are the different images contained on the page being shared / linked to.

Anyone have any ideas regarding what process Facebook is using to offer this feature? Specifically I would like to reproduce it using a combination of PHP/JQuery, and was hoping there might be an implementation out there already for me to build on.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Try this: http://www.thumbshots.org/

If that doesn't work out then maybe you can embed Alexa's site thumbnails.

Answer 2

Another option is websnapr.com

You could just add something like this to your code:

var myurl = 'http://www.google.com';
var thumbnail = '<img src="http://images.websnapr.com/?url=' + myurl + '" alt="' + myurl + '">';

document.write(thumbnail);