Sylvain Zimmer

“Open Business is still Business” – Jon Phillips

After a full day of work, most of the team around some drinks in Place de France, Luxembourg. Nice!

Today I was stunned to see that Facebook has begun loading all their pages over AJAX, very much like what they were previously doing on their iPhone frontend.

Basically, the trick is to use URLs like :

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=665788844

and never move away from “home.php”, always change the signet part only.

I think Joe Hewitt has much to do in this update because he’s the creator of the Facebook iPhone frontend, which can be considered as a closed-source fork of iUI. For those who don’t know him, he was hired to Facebook when they bought his stealth startup Parakey, and he’s also the creator of the almighty Firebug. So he’s the kind of guy who gets it right when it comes to browser stuff

I think the main reason of that change is the Chat function which was added to Facebook a couple of weeks ago. I was amazed at how they managed to reload it at each pageview and still provide a “good enough” chat experience. Still, like many others, I noticed a few issues and my guess is that they decided to solve them once and for all by avoiding to reload the page constantly, just like Gmail.

Are we at the dawn of a standardization of this kind of navigation paradigm? It sure looks so. Its advantages compared to the “regular” way are worth the added complexity if you’re big enough.

Another detail worth mentioning here is that the Facebook implementation is quite neat, as all the links to “regular” pages like www.facebook.com/notifications.php are still valid but as they use progressive enhancement, they just can turn on the advanced navigation feature at any time on the client side, and take you to www.facebook.com/home.php#/notifications.php instead.

So congrats to the Facebook team for this update, they must have begun preparing it a long time ago… What’s next?

So that’s it, I’m leaving Brisbane and going back to the new Jamendo office for good.

We have some very exciting projects going on and I can’t wait to be there with the whole team again.

As I can’t really survive without a few concerts planned for the future, I’ve already booked several of them next month

• Fred Wesley + Pee Wee Ellis at Jazz à Vienne, June 27th. Tribute to James Brown!!!
• Rock Werchter Festival, with among many others: Radiohead, Justice, Sigur Ros, Lenny Kravitz, R.E.M., Ben Harper, Moby, Beck, ….
• The Mars Volta at the Atelier, Luxembourg, July 20th. I’ve read “3 hours of concert without an opening act”. Not sure we’ll be able to make it through that!

I’ll also go to a bunch of concerts of Jamendo bands: I have found a couple of really good bands lately that I’ll feature soon with our new widget. More on that later!

… of one of my favourite bands: Mig

Of course it had been a while since they had given any news but still… it really hurts

All we’re left with now is Dhikrayat and Yamatna…

Adobe just announced they are to open source the Flash format and lifting licenses fees.

This is really big news for the web… a few thoughts on that:

• Will the search engines now be able to access Flash content more easily, and include it in their index?
• Will Gnash develop more quickly now, or will Adobe GPL its runtime making Gnash irrelevant?
• Against the Flash+AIR juggernaut, does Silverlight still have appeal for the developers?
• How long before Flash on the iPhone now?

Exciting times…

I’m going to the first WordCamp (WordPress meets BarCamp) in Paris this Saturday. I’m primarily interested in evaluating a wordpress-mu install for Jamendo and I hope to find some advice there

To become familiar with MU I’m currently trying the latest release candidate which is synced with the wordpress 2.5 tree.

I’m wondering what would be the best choice for the blog URLs :

• www.jamendo.com/blog/XXX ?
• blogs.jamendo.com/XXX ?
• XXX.jamendo.net ?

The real question behind this choice is: what’s the right tradeoff between security and integration into Jamendo?

We’ve just moved into our new office in Luxembourg City. Everyone (including myself!!) is thrilled with having our own place and it’s a great, great step in Jamendo’s history. Check out the pictures to see how awesome the office is!

We’ll be announcing an opening party soon

Once more, I’m trying to start blogging again