Facebook Style Image Grabber

22nd February 2008 11:57 by tom

I love the way Facebook works; there are so many subtly clever gizmos that just make the whole experience that little bit smoother and pleasant. One feature I particularly like is the image grabber. For those that don't know, if you enter a URL while writing a private message in Facebook, the site cleverly goes off to the URL and grabs all the images it can find for you. You can then select the image you want to include alongside your message. It's a really sweet use of Ajax; subtle and very effective. This gave me the idea to develop a similar tool for use with our social shopping site. You can see the script in action here. It's a simplified version of the code in production, but it works ok as a demo. (and please excuse the repeat of this paragraph on the demon page).