Sharing Kitchen and Bathroom Designs on Facebook from Project Showroom

Previously I outlined how you share a room design you create using Project Showroom with your friends on Facebook. One of the steps includes manually changing a Facebook profile entry from a one-liner to a story. This allows the thumbnail image of your room design to be visible to your friends. The obvious questions are "Why do I have to do this?" and "Why can't Project Showroom do this for me?"

Project Showroom Software Developer, John Schmier, shared his insight on our Facebook application.

First a bit of explanation between some of the “post to facebook” implementations you see and Project Showroom’s post to Facebook implementation. Many news organizations these days have a post to Facebook (look at SF Gate for example). These are using a Facebook supplied Application Program Interface (API) to do the posting, formatting, and image control that does not meet the needs that Project Showroom requires. For security reasons, the API that Facebook has made available to the developer community allows only a single line to show in the user's feed, This restriction was put in place about 6 months ago to address a security issue with Javascript injection hacks (http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1414). The information on the API that handles posting news feeds (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Feed.publishUserAction) has this to say about using a larger size feed postings: “The one line story is the default, and users have to opt into using larger sizes through their privacy settings. Otherwise, if the user has not allowed that particular size to be published through the API, then the story size will be demoted to match the user's preference. (Default value is short.)”

If you are collaborating on the design of a kitchen or bathroom and will be working with Project Showroom frequently, you can change your Facebook settings once to avoid having to change your one-liner to a short story with each sharing.

Steps to set Facebook to always allow posting short stories for Showroom.

1. Login to Facebook, select in Applications (upper right corner) - Edit
2. Select from the dropdown “Show” - Allowed to Post
3. Select edit settings for Autodesk Labs Project Showroom
4. Find “Allow Autodesk Labs Project Showroom to publish specific story sizes automatically without prompting.” - select Short

Or you can get to this information from:

1. Settings - Privacy Settings - News Feed and Wall
2. Find “Stories may be published about your applications” - Edit Applications
3. Select from the drop down “Show” - Allowed to Post
4. Select edit settings for Autodesk Labs Project Showroom
5. Find “Allow Autodesk Labs Project Showroom to publish specific story sizes automatically without prompting.” - select Short

Thanks John. Sharing designs from Project Showroom via Facebook is alive in the lab.