tell twitter how to preview my url?

[spacefem]

Whenever I tweet about an item on etsy, it shows this neat preview under the "view photo". I don't even use their tweet button, just cut + paste the url, and it shows up like this:

https://twitter.com/#!/etsycontest/s...70913605832704

But when I post a link to my own website, there's no "view photo" thing on twitter, it's just a boring link.

Anyone know what this uses? Is it some secret deal twitter made with etsy, or just some simple code on their site that tells them how to show a preview? I want to do something like this too, and did a bunch of view sources but couldn't find out the secret.

[DJDarkViper]

This is just ball-parking it, but...
Yes I'm pretty sure its a specific thing etsy worked out with Twitter (or even vice versa maybe). Same thing goes with -some- photo sharing sites for twitter, but not all.
You just got to work out a deal with Twitter Inc.

Facebook on the other-hand, just works.. cURL based previews of any link posted, now that's the way it should be! hehe

[J. H. Rasmussen]

Well, it looks like etsy uses this namespace: http://ogp.me/ns#
If you take a look at http://ogp.me/ you will get some more informations.
It looks like it allows a website to add additional meta-tags, forexample meta-tags with urls to images.

So that could be the difference between your website and etsy.

[DJDarkViper]

oh cool! I've only sort of heard about this but never really looked into it much

[spacefem]

Welp, I tried it, it didn't work

https://twitter.com/#!/etsycontest/s...49239130324992

The link on that page has all those extra bonus meta tags:
http://etsycontest.com/winners.php?d...light=79561379

Must be a behind-the-scenes deal with etsy. If I crack the answer to this though I will come back to celebrate with you all!