FeedMagnet

Pulling in photos and video makes tweets look better

FeedMagnet pulls in more than just text and links. A lot of updates from Twitter look like this:

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

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