Question

I have been developing an application that can publish content like some sort of feed.
I want to add the content like a link (like on the facebook wall).

Then i want some logic to parse the link destination and extract the right text and image to create a thumbnail.

Just like Facebook does it when you are posting a link on your wall.

The extraction/crawling engine seems quite complex, but what would be the best way to approach this?

I have thought about going around Facebook api and post-and-then-get-back the item from facebook and in that way simply use their engine, but i really would like to do this as an internal system.

Answer 1

AFAIK Facebook does this by using meta tags (Open Graph Protocol). You can study more at: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/.

Basically, you should define a convention if you want to implement is internally.
Hope this helps.