Facebook for your Website: What you need to know

When a Facebook user links to your site, FB generates a preview that might not always be what you want users to see.

Here is how to control it.

IMPORTANT! Once anybody has linked to your site, FB will store a cache, and you'll have to wait 24-hours before FB will listen to any meta-tags you update the page with.

(a quick hack around this is to just create a new page, like "index2.html", or "indexFacebook.html", to use for sharing)

Put this in your page:


<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:fb="http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
 <head>
<title>Vaudeville Book</title>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.yourwebsite.com/vaudeville/img0.jpg" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.yourwebsite.com/vaudeville/indexFacebook.html"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="How to Enter Vaudeville"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="How to Enter Vaudeville: The Website"/>
<meta property="og:description" content="The new economy is here, and the non-monied classes must learn how to amuse and entertain the monied classes."/>
</head>
<body>...

Probably most significant is the og:image value, because that is the picture that will be used for the the "preview" in the Facebook status post.

Then, to check out how it works, go to:

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

and enter in the url to your page.

Incidentally, this is all called "Open Graph", and here is a link to the page with info about it:
http://ogp.me/
and trusty Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Platform#Open_Graph_protocol

A quick aside on web culture

I recently started checking out the notorious MySpace and Facebook some more. About a year ago I checked them out just to make sure I was up on the latest Big Thing in my industry (since I am a web programmer, after all). I think at that time you had to have a valid University e-mail, so luckily I had my Brown alumni one. But then recently I read this Facebook for Fiftysomethings at one of my daily reads (Slate.com, I regularly check out the Human Nature column, not to mention the political stuff), which motivated me to the extent that, if Emily Yoffe could do it, so could I (though in retrospect she does seem so naive). Especially in the past month, I've been trying to be more active about "participating", and as will be no surprise to those familiar with both sites, Facebook was more to my taste. Well, on the heels of that realization, I read this today:MySpace, Facebook mirror class divisions in US society.
This just confirms my own observations.

Also, isn't "Social Networking" redundant?