Patent 9300835 was granted and assigned to Thinglink on March, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method and apparatus for receiving an image associated with an interactive service on at least one social media server, the image belonging to a group of images. The image is stored and accessing of the image by a user is detected. In response, a request with an identification of the image is sent to a back-end server to access the interactive service. Interaction messages are exchanged with the interactive service so that the interactive service associated with the image is made available to users by accessing the image.