I don’t know how legit this is but I’ve discovered a way of getting all the favicons you want in a sweet PNG format from Google’s server which seem to serve from cache. All you have to do is use the following format in your image src attribute:
http://s2.googleusercontent.com/s2/favicons?domain=DOMAIN_NAME
Where DOMAIN_NAME is the domain you’d like to receive your cached icon for. In case a domain doesn’t have a favicon or is unreachable, Google will return a slick globe icon. It seems that those servers are used for caching favicons for Google’s software such as Google Reader, Chrome and others. Once again, use this at your own risk ;)
I was thinking of a small API that would redirect to Twitter avatars (images) in a similar way by their usernames, so you could use picture sources like example.org/kovshenin.png to get my Twitter avatar. Do you guys think that would be of any use to anybody? Cheers!
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Konstantin Kovshenin and Phill Price, Amor. Amor said: Getting Cached Favicons From Google’s User Content http://bit.ly/iiItjx – via @kovshenin […]
Not sure if this is what you meant, but…
You could do it with Facebook "avatar", I got pictures for my contacts in Firebird that way ;P
I used the Graph API link http://graph.facebook.com/-username or id-/picture to put their picture in their contactcard *hahah* propably not that legit either :P Should update too if they change picture =)
Hi Mikko, thanks for the Facebook tip, and I think that's totally legit since it's done via the Facebook Graph API, they probably intended to do so and I think that services like Digg are using it.
Cheers!