Here’s a nifty little trick regarding thumbnail images on Facebook you may find interesting.

Let’s say you’re adding a link to a message you’re posting on someone’s wall. In the case above, I’m adding www.brucespringsteen.net to my status. Facebook gives me the option of choosing 1 of 9 thumbnails to go with the link. The thumbnails correspond to images that appear on that page.

Pretty simple, right? But let’s say you’re the owner of the page in question and, for whatever reason, you want to give me 10 choices and not 9 … and you want to do so without adding another image to the page.

Here’s what you do: Add the extra photo to the page, but program it to display at 0 x 0 pixels. The image won’t appear on your page, but it will appear as a thumbnail option on Facebook.

What’s the practical application for such a trick? I can’t think of many, but I can imagine some sort of “share this page on Facebook and use the secret thumbnail” activity that, if properly presented, could be interesting. There are probably a few others, but I haven’t thought about it all that deeply.

It would be cool, though, if Facebook would allow page owners to specify one thumbnail to go with the page in question; you can do that with thumbnails relative to the Like button (this page explains how), but as far as I know not with pasting a URL into a message.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 11:02 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Social Media, Springsteen.