URL Description and Thumbnail API [closed]

Question

Does anyone know of an API that will return the description of a URL and a thumbnail image from that URL?

What i'm looking for is something similar to what facebook does where you paste in a link and it returns the page title, description and image.

I was hoping one of the URL shortening services did this, or even digg, but so far no luck.

Answer 1

ShrinkTheWeb seems to have a lot of positive comments from their service. They also have a free plan.

Answer 2

I know this question is a few years old now but I thought I would let you know about a new site / API called ThumbnailApp.com. It's like ShrinkTheWeb however you get the URL description and title along with the thumbnail. It will also use Open Graph images for the thumbnail if the page has implemented the open graph og: meta tags.

I think it's a good fit for what you're after because the whole idea is to make it easy to build your own Facebook style "media share".

Full disclosure: I'm a developer for ThumbnailApp

Answer 3

• bluga webthumb: http://webthumb.bluga.net/home
• PageGlimpse: http://www.pageglimpse.com/
• Websnapr: http://www.websnapr.com/premium_services/

Answer 4

If I understand the question properly he is looking for a image from the site (rather than a thumbnail of the site).

There is an awesome implementation of this, very similar to facebook, here: http://redsunsoft.com/2011/01/parse-link-like-facebook-with-jquery-and-php/