Rich link preview and IM apps

- 2 minutes read - 313 words

Two days ago, I have a fun journey to find more about rich link preview features in social media, web apps and IM apps.

The journey began with that the shared link of one of my company sites in skype was shown without pictures, just a plain link. Searching the feature of skype "link preview", I found https://socialsharepreview.com/. I knew what missed in the homepage as in the following list.

  • og:title

  • og:type

  • og.image

  • og.url

  • twitter:card

<head>
<title>Flutter Hero Animations </title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Flutter Hero Animations">
<meta property="og:type" content="video.other">
<meta property="og:image" content="https://files.betamax.raywenderlich.com/attachments/collections/222/0c45fb39-9f82-406f-9237-fc1a07a7af15.png">
<meta property="og:description" content="<p>Learn and understand how to use the Hero widget in Flutter to animate beautiful screen transitions for your apps.</p>
">
<meta property="og:site_name" content="raywenderlich.com">
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="/favicon.png">
...
</head>

To my surprise, the link in skype still was a normal link even it was shown correctly in https://socialsharepreview.com. I shared another website and found the picture of the site was served from https://sa1-urlp.secure.skypeassets.com/ in the web version of skype at https://web.skype.com/.

Searching around the internet using keywords "Link previews server client generate regenerate", I noticed the link Link previews in IM apps and privacy. In the article, I learnt that some apps generated the preview at client sides, some at the server side. The logical result of serve side is that those contents are cached at server side.

Now it is clear, the question is how to clear or regenerate those cached contents. The thing is that not all of those services provide the ways to do so. I only found one telegram bot @WebpageBot and didn’t find others in IMs.

For the timing being, I only got so far and don’t get the way to resolve my initial problem. However it still was a interesting journey.

Thanks for reading. Please leave a message if you find a way to do so in skype.

Reference

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