Blog

20
Jason Ford
Jan. 20, 2010

Pulling in photos and video makes tweets look better

FeedMagnet pulls in more than just text and links. A Twitter stream by itself can be kind of lame - all plain text - but there is usually a lot of really interesting content in there buried in the links. Photos, videos, news articles, and other content can all be found in plain text tweets. FeedMagnet makes things more interesting by pulling that content in and showing it instead of the plain link.

An example

A lot of updates from Twitter look like this:

Screenshot of a tweet from Twitter

And while that is nice, we think it could look a lot nicer:

Tweet with photos and links pulled in automatically

Here's how we do that:

  1. First, we scan the tweet for anything that looks like a link
  2. If we find links, we expand them to get the long URLs (e.g. "tinyurl.com/blah" becomes "http://www.mysite.com/some/long/url")
  3. Next we see if we can recognize any of the links as photos or videos - if so, we pull in the media
  4. If we didn't find a photo or video, we pull in the favicon for the website and display it as a link
  5. Finally, we strip the original link out of the text of the update to make it all look prettier

The end result is a much more engaging experience for users - with inline photos, videos, and expanding links.

We currently recognize the following media type from inside tweets:

  • YouTube
  • TwitPic
  • Flickr
  • yFrog
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