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When posting a status update on social website like facebook.com and linkedin.com which contain an URL, it will automatically scan the images available on the particular website and put it at the front of the status update.

May I know how this could be done if I would like to do the same for my web app? Which web framework (JSF, Richfaces, JQuery, ...) should I use in such development? Beside that, is there any pre-build features available in blogger.com or wordpress.com?

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The closest I could find is this Facebook Like URL data Extract Using jQuery PHP and Ajax http://www.99points.info/2010/07/facebook-like-extracting-url-data-with-jquery-ajax-php/

This does pretty much what you want, it's based on the older facebook layout. You can style it however you want. Basically jQuery is fetching the image and the status is updating with AJAX.

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For facebook it is done through Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags. Dave walsh has done a great blog post on the meta tags. http://davidwalsh.name/facebook-meta-tags

Its really simple to put into your site. Just add the extra content to your head. Im sure there are plugins for popular frameworks (wordpress / joomla) that help with this and make it a bit easier.

If you omit open graph tags, facebook tries its best to guess the information about your site.

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I read your question wrong. If you want to build this type of functionality, you need to "scrape" the page for the proper tags. I suggest you just scrape the ones used by Facebook's open graph or schema.org tags. There is a jquery schema .org tester script you could modify to do this on the client side. For server side php / asp / and any other language have the ability to "scrape" by using xmlhttp requests. Just request the page and parse out the items you need. – Frank Nov 27 '12 at 17:55
Basically I like that idea on how they manage the link, this way is much more informative rather than a long URL address string which I feel very annoying. Thus I was thinking to integrate this idea into my personal blogspot and wordpress (self host for internal used only). – huahsin68 Nov 28 '12 at 1:14
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Its a smart idea, specially when someone shares your blog on facebook. If you are building your own application, you can mimick this functionality. The best I have seen is on Schema.org. If your crawler can scrape a page and read its schema information then you can really understand the content of the site you are linking to . – Frank Nov 28 '12 at 14:39

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