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Facebook App Support
posted 06/12/2012, updated on 08/20/12
Updated August 20, 2012: Insteo generally no longer shows images not hosted on Facebook in our Facebook App by default, unless you're posting images from your own site or a site you control or trust. The note below explains the previous issue and work-around. If you are certain that your external images are hosted on a correct server, we can re-enable these images for your screen on request.
The Insteo Flash Based App may become locked up if your Facebook Page contains content shared outside of Facebook. Flash files which read content remotely require permission to do so. This permission is found in a file the website manager needs to add to the remote site. Sites like Facebook, YouTube and other major sites have this "permission file" in place, but if you share images or videos from a third party site which does not have this file, you may have issues.
Now that Adobe Flash is becoming less used on websites, this permissions file isn't always added to websites by default.
Problem Happens when:
You “Share” a link containing an image or video on Facebook linked from a website which doesn't permit Flash Apps from reading images on their website.
Problem Never Happens when:
You “Share” a link containing an image on Facebook from a website which does permit Flash Apps from reading images on their website. .
You post images and videos directly to Facebook.
Work-around Solutions:
Post images and videos directly to Facebook, or Share images or videos from other people's Facebook pages, instead of sharing content which contains images, thumbnails, or videos from other websites.
Contact the owner of the website you are sharing content from and see if they can add the Flash permissions file "Crossdomain.xml" which allows flash to read content from third party website.
If you have to share content from third party websites on your main Facebook wall, consider adding a second Facebook page just for your digital signs where you never post.
How long does it take for my Tweet or Email to show up?
updated on March 2 2013
Insteo's Feed Aggregation servers work to dynamically avoid rate limiting on the various services they contact. Rate Limiting is the number of times per minute, hour or other time period you can contact a service like Twitter requesting new tweets.
Each service has different rate limits, for example gMail can begin to limit our requests if we ask for email more than once every 10 minutes! Of course everything is dynamic and the services don't publish their actual rates.
Our Feed Aggregation servers work to avoid rate limiting and act as a good neighbor to services like Twitter and Gmail. If you don't email or get tweets very often, the feed may slow itself down significantly, asking for updates only every 20 or 30 minutes at times. This means if you tweet for the first time after not tweeting for a few days, it may take a while before your new tweet shows up.
If you do have a long pause of new tweets, but then become more active again your Feed will dynamically begin to speed up, trying to request new content as fast as we're allowed, based on the speed at which new tweets or emails are coming through.
If we find out that the services are getting mad at us for requesting too often, we'll slow down again, but still trying to keep pace with the speed of the new tweets or emails.
tl:dr - if you speed up tweeting, we speed up checking for new tweets. If you slow down, we slow down. There may be a delay when you speed up again, as we catch up that you're tweeting or emailing actively again.
We do this to avoid your requests from getting blocked, so it's a good strategy over getting shut down outright!
Notes about Screen Sizes
posted 05/02/2012
Computer and television screens support different resolutions, like 1080p, 720p, and a large number of "VGA" resolutions.
By default, Insteo Apps are built for "Full HD - 1080p" setups. On setting up your content, if we find your screens use a different setting than Full HD 1080p, we will modify the content to fit your screen.
The content does not automatically scale, so when we are working on your setup we are building this content specifically to fit your screens.
If you or your AV staff changes the resolution, or if your change screens after we complete the setup, the content could be off.
If this should happen, and the Apps no longer seem scaled to fit, please contact your AV staff first to make sure they haven't changed any settings. If they have, change these settings back. If you have changed screens, make sure the new screens are setup correctly for the right resolution.
In order for Insteo to assist with troubleshooting any scaling issues, you must have someone in front of your screen with us on the phone when you call.
Calls to Action & Texting
Here is some information with regards to Calls to Action and Texting.
Required Messaging and Length of Optional Marketing Message
We have 130 characters, in addition to the required messaging:
Reply STOP Keyword 2 Optout.
The length of the keyword itself reduces the length of the overall message. So if the Keyword is SOMETHINGREALLYLONG, you have less for the marketing message. The required message appears at the end of the reply text, as in To learn more about us visit http://insteo.com - Reply STOP Keyword 2 Optout
Call to Action Samples
Texting involves sending a message beginning with your keyword to the short code 313131. So if your keyword is Insteo, you’d write “Insteo I love the new Apps!”. Writing “Great work Insteo” would not send the message through.
Securing Keywords
We recommend choosing the keywords right away – please provide us with alternatives as well in case the first options aren’t available. A keyword may be between two or twelve letters and numbers. No spaces or special characters are allowed.
Videos on your screens
Insteo supports a whole range of video files such as MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV - but, playback depends on the setup of your Digital Signage hardware player and CMS software.
We've found the safest option is MP4/H.264 video. Even within this format, there are still dozens of choices for how to encode the video. We recommend variable bit-rate videos with a maximum bitrate of 25mbps. If you're unsure what any of this means, let us know and we'll offer a hand.
Your Facebook Page
You must personalize your Facebook URL. This can be done by doing the following:
- Go to Admin Panel then go to Edit Page. Choose Update Info from drop down menu. Click Resources and then under Connect With People choose Select a username
Having Enough Tweets or Facebook Posts
In order for Insteo Display to pull official Facebook posts or tweets, you must have 5 recent Facebook posts or tweets. For Twitter, these posts must be within the last two weeks.
Before your event starts, tweet from your account to build momentum for your event, and to give Insteo Display enough tweets to begin displaying content.
Foursquare Support
Showing Foursquare check-ins on your screens requires you to be the "owner" or "manager" of your location - a process which in some cases requires you to fill out a form online and wait for Foursquare to mail you something back. For Events, there may not be enough time to register yourself as the owner of the venue, in which case we can't offer Foursquare check-ins on your screen.
It's possible for some venues you may know the Social Media coordinator who is already registered as the manager of the location. In those cases, we can have this person authorize Insteo's App to gather check-in data about people in their venue.
Issues with Private Content on Facebook
Posted on 2/21/2013
Facebook has been aggressively rate limiting in the past few weeks anytime we make a request for a potentially private profile image or other private content. The trouble is, we don’t know which ones are private until after they’ve blocked the request!
We have a few solutions for this:
-In older Facebook Apps, we can set the App to not pull likes or comments. Your official page posts are all public content, so they are never impacted by this.
-We have a new App, which requests new content far less often. The current one requests FB updates every 2 minutes, the new one requests content less frequently, and dynamically slows itself down, to as little as every 60 minutes if Facebook gets upset because we requested a private profile image. This avoids getting shut down!
-If we do get blocked for any reason, for a short while we’ll show only ‘generic’ profile images. Once the blocking is lifted, we’ll show pictures again. This is only a backup that should only appear rarely, if ever.
Cross Domain Support for Flash Apps
updated on 3/10/2013
Most of our Flash Apps don't make cross domain calls, but if they do, and they can't find a crossdomain.xml permissions file on your site, they may get stuck.
Here's a working crossdomain.xml file for you to download and add to your server, if you don't already have one. This is very standard, allowing any domain to read content from your site.
This must be installed on any domain you post images to Facebook from, for example http://yourdomain.com/crossdomain.xml must be a valid URL, and can't return a 404 error, or our Flash App won't work.
Alternatively, you can post your images right on Facebook - that works perfectly every time.
This is standard Adobe cross domain schema, as defined here.
Download: crossdomain.zip
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Current Status:
| Service | Status | Last known Issue | | Insteo API | UP | slow performance on
3/12/2013 03:12 AM | | App Designer | UP | server maintenance on
3/17/2013 11:58 PM | | WebServices | UP | Facebook rate limit on
2/20/2013 09:37 PM |
times are Pacific (PST/PDT)
App Support
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