Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Google Plus vs Facebook: URL Resolution

You know that nifty, clever feature, where you paste a URL into Facebook or Google Plus, and they chew on it for a second or two, and then create a mini-snippet to post?  Usually, they pull in a graphic and maybe the page description, or meta-description.  So, I noticed today how different they really are.  I also noticed that, as much as I really don't like Facebook anymore, it does a better job of rendering and polishing that result before posting it.  Case in point:  I posted the URL to an interesting book (ha ha!)... http://www.amazon.com/Stuck-Up-Inserted-Ingested-ebook/dp/B0056DR5KY  into Facebook and Google Plus.  Here's how each of them rendered the result...

Facebook

Google Plus
Google Plus pulls in the authors and makes it part of the subject heading, but it ends up being too cluttered.  The Facebook result is cleaner and easier to read.  Also, the descriptions are very different.  Entirely different, actually.  I think the Facebook result wins.

2 comments:

Rod Trent said...

Have you tried LinkedIn's add a link feature? I think it actually does a better job.

skatterbrainz said...

I have, and I agree it is very good. I can't rate it against the other two, mostly because I haven't tried enough different URL types with it, but it definitely belongs in the top 3.