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How WhatsApp Makes Links Come to Life: A Developer’s Guide to OG Metadata Scraping in NodeJS
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console.log("Hi there!");I‘m back again with an interesting question!
Imagine you want to share a YouTube link with your friend. You paste that link into the chat, and like magic, you see the thumbnail, title, and description of that YouTube page right there in the chat!
Now the question is: How does WhatsApp provide you with a preview of the entire web page without you even visiting the page?
Let’s dive into this and understand the process step-by-step.
So, What Does WhatsApp Do??? 🤔
Let’s start with a little story. Facebook (now known as META), a social media giant, faced a challenge back in 2010. They wanted to make sharing web pages more visually appealing on their platform instead of just showing a boring URL as plain text.
To solve this, Facebook introduced a web standard called the “Open Graph” (OG) Protocol.
The Birth of the Open Graph Protocol
The Open Graph Protocol is a set of guidelines that Facebook created. It encourages web…
