Design Challenges

Facebook Thumbnail

It seems that now-a-days social networking is all the rage. I been on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Digg and all other social media for a long, long time now, but haven't seen the big potential in any since the days where Digg was driving all the traffic to my sites.

Since I started using Facebook, about two years ago, I have seen an influx of communication with family and friends that I would typically not reach out to on as much of a regular basis as I do with the social platform. As for twitter, honestly, I just don't see the point or get it. I can do much more with Facebook, and see Twitter as a spam platform for celebs to sell themselves and companies to sell products. I just can't be bother.

My sites all have Facebook Connect and automated interaction with social media, and see the value in the traffic that is driven everyday from the sites to mine.

I learned today that as Web developers, we still have some control of our sites within the social platforms. For example, when someone grabs one of your links to post on Facebook, the link shows up on the page with a brief description and a thumbnail. The description comes from the meta description data, lack of the tag forces facebook to grab the first few lines of text it encounters. The thumbnail comes from the first tag it finds, or you can specify via the tag with photo to grab. To do so, specify it as follows,

<link rel="image_src" type="image/jpeg" href="http://www.domain.com/path/icon-facebook.gif" />


The bottom line is than in this day of super automation, it is nice to know that you still have some control over what happens beyond your control. Good luck and keep on socializing, someday computers will run the world on their own, we will continue to get paid, and socializing will be all we do.

Labels: advertising, brand, content management, Design, Digg, Search Engine, SEO, Social Bookmarking