michael kamleitner

According to this official announcment on Facebook’s Developer Blog from monday, Facebook started rolling out a new version of their popular Live-Stream plugin, which provides easy live-chat capabilities to both Facebook-Apps and external websites (we have implemented this plugin on our “Mein Klub” soccer-app and ATV’s  ”Am Punkt”). While the blog-post doesn’t get very specific about what was actually changed (besides the welcome addition of an option to avoid posting chat-messages to a user’s profile by default), we discovered that the change seems to break existing implementations of the plugin which are using iframes to display the live-chat. Commonly used iframe-embeds of the Live-Stream plugin referrig to http://www.facebook.com/widgets/livefeed.php seem to have stopped working at all – the URL just returns an empty document: <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/livefeed.php?app_id=119818284846&width=490&height=600" width="490" height="600" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" frameborder="0"></iframe> Instead, the new iframe embed-code which can be generated here, refers to http://www.facebook.com/plugins/live_stream_box.php: <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/live_stream_box.php??app_id=119818284846&amp;width=490&amp;height=600&amp;via_url&amp;always_post_to_friends=false" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="490" height="600"> So, for an easy fix just change your embeds to the new schema. As you can see, the updated embed-code also features the new parameter always_post_to_friends – however, in our experiments, this parameter didn’t yet show any effect on the acutal behavior of the plugin. Unfortunately the new Live Stream-plugin seems to omit the width- & height-parameters, so for now you’ll have to live with the default dimensions of 400x450px. PS: good news is, that the -tag used for integration on canvas-apps and Facebook Connect-sites seems not to be affected by these bugs!

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