So I've been learning how to control the thumbnails that show up when a page is shared on Failbook, and I thought I'd test out how Active Social handled it.

Facebook, and a number of other sites, will respect one of two tags in the html header:


The first being the opengraph standard, and the newer implementation.

Looks like Active Social just retrieves the page and scans for img tags it can handle. Nothing wrong with that, but controlling the thumbnails is a desirable behaviour, so it'd be great to see this included in a future version.

Matt,
This is a great feature request. When we first implemented the share link feature very few sites used the meta headers. CNN.com is a good example of a site that still don't think offers the image in the meta tag. We will definitely consider adding an option so that it checks for an image in the meta first, but still use the current technique of parsing the page as other options.

Thanks Will. I think it's fair to say that not implementing it was the right call at the time - especially since OG seems to be very recent indeed. I only paid attention to it because I'd seen a lot more sites start to override it, and I must admit it's potentially quite a bit neater. Odd to think that Facebook is the one popularising it...