My friend, David Mejías, pretty much says it all — in 132 characters.
One of the media companies that needs to do this ASAP is the The New York Times. No, NYT, I don’t want to just “recommend” a story, that appears as a line in my FB status timeline. I’d like to post the story — myself. That means doing a cut and paste of the story URL into my FB wall.
But if I do that, look at the ugly placeholder art that runs alongside the post:
When instead it should grab the photo that appeared with the story online:
The smartest FB users are tech-savvy and don’t want to post items that look unsophisticated or unattractive.
Cindy E. Rodríguez 
Completely agree. But some articles online don’t have pictures attached. What do you suggest to prettify those links?
Henry,
Those websites need to understand that we are visual beings. So if no photo is available, they need to find an illustration/chart/graphic that works. They can search for it using Creative Commons Search or Wikipedia if they don’t have an in-house illustrator or graphic artist. They can also data visualization tools like Wordle or ManyEyes to create visualizations or what we in the newspaper biz used to call “art.”