Facebook will use any open graph meta tags if present for the title, and image etc (eg, og:title). The facebook documentation for Open Graph Protocol explains this in more detail:
The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:
og:title - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".
og:type - The type of your object, e.g., "movie". See the complete list of supported types.
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1.
og:url - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.
In addition, we've extended the basic meta data to add two required fields to connect your page with Facebook:
og:site_name - A human-readable name for your site, e.g., "IMDb".
fb:admins or fb:app_id - A comma-separated list of either Facebook user IDs or a Facebook Platform application ID that administers this page. It is valid to include both fb:admins and fb:app_id on your page.
It's also recommended that you include the following property as well as these multi-part properties.
og:description - A one to two sentence description of your page.
I'm not sure how they do it for pages lacking these tags. If you're trying to duplicate this functionality then this is no help, sorry. But if you're trying to ensure your pages show up in the Publisher as you want then maybe this will.
You can also use the facebook opengraph debugger, which will provide info about your preview as well as (super handy) update their cached link if you make changes. Otherwise you can make changes to a link you want to share and the changes will not show up for days:
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
They don't work. Such apps are rogue apps. You can confirm by seeing that the numbers, counts et al are the same for each person.
The whole idea is to get people to use it so that the app can steal personal data/use it for datamining or sell it off.
Best Answer
To enable Facebook timeline, go here: http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline
Hit: "Get Timeline."
Warning: Once you activate your timeline, you will not be able to go back to the original layout. According to this article, all Facebook users will soon be required to switch over to Timeline view.