Can I format Yahoo Link Preview from a website? - email

Yahoo Link Preview is a facility of Yahoo Mail in which one enters a website url on outgoing mail and Yahoo Mail automatically picks up an image from the website and some text and displays this graphically on the body of the outgoing mail.
My question is whether it is possible to include anything on the website (like a meta tag) that would specify the image, text and background color of what Yahoo picks up. I can't find anything online.
Thanks in advance,
John

Yes, as a matter of fact you can. Yahoo LinkPreviews reads OpenGraph & Schema.org tags. So, you can specify meta tags using the OpenGraph spec if you'd like.
Some OpenGraph examples would be og:title, og:image, and og:description.
Here is the spec for OpenGraph:
http://ogp.me

Related

Can you force Facebook to recognize correct image without og: tags?

I have a website where news articles get posted through CMS and there is no option to add Facebook META OG tags to <head>. I could only add them manually to <body> but that won't work I assume?
Is there another solution where you can tell Facebook which image should be picked when using like/share buttons?
This depends how you make the share. You can use the FB.Ui to request a "Post to a wall" where you can specify the specifics of what appears on the share.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/feed/
If you are sharing the URL only it will read your meta tags as you state. I have not tried making that image the first within the HTML as this may also make that the default.
you can use this link to debug your meta tags and test your sharing if you are sharing a URL.
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Localizing Facebook "scrapes"

We're running a canvas app that has fully localized og tags. Everything is working well except when users choose to manually copy the facebook app url (apps.facebook.com/mysite) into a post.
When that happens, we want the text in the posted message to be in the user's language. Instead, it's always uses the English text from the og: meta tags.
If I could detect which culture the user came from, I could change those meta tags. However I don't see anything in the request header or parameters that are sent from the scraper to indicate where the user is coming from.
I did see that there's an og:locale:alternate tag I could use to specify other languages the page is available in, but unless I get a second request from Facebook with a locale value I don't see how that benefits me.
How can I ensure the posted title/description is in the user's language?
Must it be done using the Localization section in the Facebook App settings?
If so, is there a way to automate it? Our translation workflow is pretty well established and I don't want to send translators into the facebook app to finish the job.
You most probably need some parameter in the querystring to differentiate the urls.
e.g
http://apps.facebook.com/my_app/en/
or
http://apps.facebook.com/my_app/it/
this parameter will actually set the active language on your app.
And facebook scraper will cache the localized title/ description from the meta tags.

customize share text for G+, FB, and LinkedIn, WITHOUT using OG meta tags

Twitter has a beautiful share API. If I want to customize text, I just include it in the URL I'm linking to:
<a href="https://twitter.com/share"
class="twitter-share-button"
data-text="whoa, check out this SUPER-EASY CUSTOMIZED TWEET TEXT!"
data-via="foo">
Tweet
</a>
My question is whether there is a way to do this with Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.
I want to be able to do this without having to put og meta tags in the link target. Basically instead of the link target having knowledge of the message, I want the share button itself to have that knowledge.
Thanks
It is a good idea to populate your pages with metadata to describe them to non-human systems including search engines, social networks, screen readers etc. For Google+, you have your choice methods: Schema.org metadata, OpenGraph, or simple meta names/descriptions. You can read more about how to populate snippets from your site at https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/snippet/

using facebook share link with sharepoint

I have added a facebook share link to my sharepoint site using:
<a name="fb_share"></a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share"
type="text/javascript">
</script>
I have added the script to the masterpage and the link to the page layout. I all works fine apart from that when a new page is created using the masterpage with the script some of the editong tools are disabled. For example the Format and Markup Style Menus are disabled. Can this be problem be solved?
You might want to take a look at this link :
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
It contains all the official Facebook plugins that you can embed into your site. In your case you should look in specific at the Send Button.
The Send Button allows users to easily send content to their friends.
People will have the option to send your URL in a message to their
Facebook friends, to the group wall of one of their Facebook groups,
and as an email to any email address. While the Like Button allows
users to share content with all of their friends, the Send Button
allows them to send a private message to just a few friends.
The message will include a link to the URL specified in the send
button, along with a title, image, and short description of the link.
You can specify what is shown for the title, image, and description by
using Open Graph meta tags.
It is very easy to implement these plugins - usually a case of "copy-and-paste". It looks to me that you have been using an outdated method of the Facebook share feature.

Post multiple hyperlinks with an anchor text to a facebook wall via Graph API

I need to make a post to my facebook wall from my windows application. The post must have multiple links embeded within the post content. I can do it using Grap API but the problem is that I cannot specify an anchor text for links. The links themselves are very long so it's absolutly necessary for us to have an anchor text. But it seems facebook does not understand anchor text tags.
I know there is a "link" object but it's not an option because it allows only one "link" object per post.
Is there any way to post multiple links with an anchor text within a single post via Graph API?
Thank you
In short, no.
You can use a Link object, in which case you can supply a Message, Title, Description and Caption, but you can't actually hide the link, or display different text on your link - Facebook will always control how your hyperlinks work.
Other messages and Posts are plain text, so you can't use HTML formatting elements either.
It's all done to reduce the potentially hideous display of messages posted to Facebook, and to protect users from disingenuous link texts.
You can use Facebook Notes feature instead. Facebook Notes fully support HTML.
See this. How spotify have done this if formatting html elements are not allowed.
Facebook notes really support HTML. So yo can post links like this:
03131991saty