Thursday, January 24, 2008

Something Cool From Facebook

I've complained a bit about Facebook's targeted ads, and how if you say you're a single male interested in women you get spammed with "Meet Girls" ads that are very annoying. So to balance that criticism, I wanted to share something I discovered this morning and thought was really cool.

If you type a link into a private message, Facebook will automatically go fetch some metadata from that page and display a snippet of information alongside your message. It's pretty slick, and easy to remove if you want. Only works for the first site you enter, but that's fine. Basically it pulls in:

  • The first image on the page
  • The page title
  • The meta description for the page
It'd be great if this sort of feature was available for blogs, emails, etc. - or even for sites like Del.icio.us.

1 comment:

ThomasHan said...

Tony,

Cool, didn't know you have a blog too. Just sub on my GR :-)

Yeah, I noticed that about FB too. Most of the time I just check the "don't include image" check box. But it is a pretty slick feature, agree :-)