Hello, Im a bit curious about this Facebook's useful functionality. When I paste a URL on the 'What's on your mind?' box, it almost perfectly gets the body of the article. How does Facebook do this?
Thanks!
+1
A:
I can't speak for Facebook specifically, but there are entire companies dedicated to providing that kind of service. For example, Reddit recently outsourced preview generation to a 3rd party.
So, essentially, there's a certain amount of automation and a large amount of manual tweaking and configuration.
You might also look at the Readability tool, which extracts the main content of a web page - that might provide some insight into the processes involved.
Andy
2010-10-19 10:10:06
+1
A:
It's part of how Facebook Share works.
The URL Linter is pretty helpful as well. For example, if we test it with this very question, you can scroll down and see where it's getting the data from
"Hello, Im a bit curious about this Facebook's useful functionality. When I paste a URL on the 'What's on your mind?' box, it almost perfectly gets the body of the article. How does Facebook do this?" extracted from
<description>or first<p>
Peter Bailey
2010-10-19 15:37:16
A:
You can put your own entries into the shared content, by using the things described in the OpenGraph protocol on Facebook developer website.
Evgeny
2010-10-20 16:01:58