I just read this article about jiwa.fm - article in French.

They explain that jiwa.fm which made a deal with Universal Music will eventually contain more than 250000 music titles, which people will be able to play for free online.

The site is sponsored by advertising (banners on the site).

There are more titles than on deezer.com, on which I wrote an article previously, and I could not wait to try it out.

So I created an account and tried to play some music I could not find on deezer.com but I was able to find there.

I unfortunately was unable to play any music from the site, which looks perfectly fine (all the songs / albums are available, but pressing the play button does not do anything. I tried in firefox, opera, internet explorer and could not get it to work. I disabled pop up blocker, ad blocker, antivirus but it did not change anything.

I therefore have the impression that jiwa.fm use the same geo-ip technology as deezer.com to disable most of the site to other countries than France. I was not able to find any documentation anywhere regarding that problem though.

A couple of my French friends tried it from France and it worked in their end.

I will look for a solution, but at the meantime if anyone knows what the problem is, or knows how to use the site outside of France please let me know.

EDIT: the geoip problem is confirmed by this site (article in French). They explain that most of the music is only accessible from France. This is a legal issue (same thing as Deezer). I will edit this post if I find out more. At the same time keep me updated too!

Thanks :-)

Edit 20/04/08:
I have been trying to use the TOR network with Jiwa.fm and it never really worked. I once managed to get a french IP from the network but it was really too slow to use, and i always gave up. I tried again this morning, got a Canadian IP (Calgary) and it works perfectly fine! This makes me wonder why the site works in Calgary and not in England. It certainly has to be with licences as it was suggested by anonymous.
Now the only problem is that next time I start using the TOR network I will get another IP, likely to be from another country, which may not work or which may be too slow.
I am positive I will find a durable solution though :)

Labels: free music online, geoip, jiwa, new technology, tip

I have been going for a few months to the Facebook developers garage where developers, entrepreneurs and companies gather for one evening a month to learn / discuss / think about facebook applications.

One of the trend discussed this month is that Facebook users seem to have enough of most of those applications that came up since the facebook API was open to developers. A poll was started live during the event, asking Facebook users what they think the application are useful for. The results are quite strong, and show that almost 90% of users do not see any real use for them.

Other signs are the multiple Facebook groups and petitions joined by thousands such as the "ban the inviting of friends on applications", almost a million user at the time of writing, the " ban apps that force to invite before you can use them" etc.

Well, the good thing is that the Facebook people are listening to those complaints. The layout keeps on changing so people can have a clean homepage not filled with dozens of apps anymore (there's a new layout coming up soon too). We also learnt yesterday that it will soon be forbidden to force people to invite their friends in order to use an application.

This is one step to the right direction, but I think that the most important task is for us, developers, to build interesting and useful applications, as most users are not interested anymore in using them just because it's new. This time's over

I reckon we should see in this phase 2 some very interesting applications, and I can't wait to develop some myself!

On a funny note, for those who have not seen it yet, this video illustrates perfectly this post (and my girl friend will be happy as she's in the video ;-) ).

Labels: facebook, facebook application, trend

I had to design a website for a house on sale lately. I was looking for the best way of putting up a map of the area and pinpoint the location house on it.

I came accross the google ajax map search wizard, which from a combination of information (postcode, house number, area name, etc) generates a control which code you can just copy and paste in your html.

The height and width of the control is adjustable, you can search for places on the map, zoom in and out and drag the map around from within the control, it really is having a google map in your site.

It's great, and the result looks awesome on the webpage (EDIT: there is now an English version of this page)

Labels: google, interactivity, map, self promotion, tip, web design