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Now it seems this has caused controversies with “some” claiming that these views are fake and RJ is making it up. We’ve strived to make our video views count show up accurately. While we make sure that if the same person views the video twice within a certain amount of time that it only counts once, maybe sites like Youtube are more restrictive and their period of time is longer than ours. I’m not sure because they don’t publish their algorithms on what a “view” is. But I can tell you that the video file for the Siavash Ghomayshi video definitely has been served up over a million times, at least.

If you compare this video with other videos on our website, you can easily see that the statistics for it are through the roof. It has about 3,000 votes. And with what definitely can not be faked by RJ, you can see that it has almost 10,000 shares on Facebook. If everyone of those shares were done by people that have an average of 200 friends and say only 20 of those friends ended up watching the video, well you can see where a lot of the views can come from. And to be clear, our view count also includes views from both Facebook shares and our popular iPhone app.

However, what’s really interesting is that some of the staff of one of our competitor’s websites, Bia2, have started a thread on their forum and accusing RJ of faking the view counts on the Siavash Ghomayshi video. But their “data” is completely flawed. They decided to use Alexa’s numbers to show that the video could not possible have had that many views. Now, Alexa’s accuracy is completely bogus but let’s pretend it’s not.

In their post, Bia2’s calculation is based on the number that Alexa provides for RJ, which is 50,677, and they calculate that to mean how many visitors RJ gets every day. Except that number is the ranking of RJ compared to other websites, not the site’s daily traffic. If it was, then Google would have 1 visitor a day.

And this is where it gets downright ironic. If you go to the videos that Bia2 displays, their “view” count number is always evenly divisible by 6. How is that possible? Hmm… Here are two screenshots of this before they fix this.

And let me say one more important thing about the Siavash Ghomayshi video — everyone of us at RJ were shocked at the traffic for this video and we did not expect it. Our traffic levels on those first few days of the premiere matched the levels we’d see during the Persian New Year (Saal Tahvil) time, which is the biggest time every year. Looking back, there’s a few things that I think contributed to this success. One, we had teasers and advertisements for the video before the release. Two, Siavash’s management did an unbelievable job in promoting the video on their own. Three, there are many, many web blogs that are dedicated to Siavash and helped spread this video. And four, Siavash is pretty damn popular on the internet (much more than most artists).

I’m not the type of person that brags about how good RJ is, and I hope I didn’t come across like that in this post. We do our thing and let people decide, which is what matters most. I was surprised, though, to see the staff members of Bia2 venting out their frustration in public. We all know the Persian industry is a small community, and it needs everyone’s support to keep growing. Competition is a good thing, it keeps the industry on its toes and doesn’t let a few people dictate its destiny. We’ve never tried to play favorites at RJ and try to treat everyone as fairly as possible. As an example, if an artist works with one of our competitors, it doesn’t mean that we’re going to boycott them. We will still support them. That’s who we are, and that’s how we operate.

When I started, the first thing that I did was research on some existing iPhone frameworks, such as the popular iUI and the new jQTouch. But they all try to copy the iPhone native style too much and none of them really allowed me to have a custom look and feel. I looked towards some of the sites that I visit frequently on my iPhone such as ESPN, Google Reader, and Facebook, and what did they all have in common — they looked custom made.

So I spent a few weeks figuring out and writing the framework from scratch before I built out the individual pages. What did this involve? Just only less than 300 lines of jQuery code and the necessary CSS. But it really isn’t anything too genius, just took some time figuring out what I wanted. By the way, it is insanely easy and fun when working on supporting only one browser (Webkit), and then to have that browser support all the latest CSS.

The end result? http://m.radiojavan.com

I’ve currently done the most popular sections which includes Music Videos, Events (with geo location), and Podcasts. If you have any feedback, please let me know!

• I started off with this great guide and example project. Like most Facebook/Rails integrations, this project makes use of the awesome Facebooker library — I say “awesome” because the author still keeps it updated.
• Part of getting the integration working is that you have to send a “facebook.connect.registerUsers” command to register your existing users with FB. This API allows you to send accounts in batches of 1,000 — but it doesn’t work if you do it that high (you get HTTP errors and no-ops). In fact, I couldn’t even get it working in batches of 100, so I just ended up doing a call for each user (that would be almost 40,000+ calls for RJ).
• One important thing to note is that FB never sends the account’s email address to you. So if you want to know a new user’s email address (which is a must for RJ), then you should just simply ask for it in a signup form after they authenticated your app thru FB.
• A tricky problem is what to do if the user already has an account on your website with a DIFFERENT email address than their FB account. I’m still trying to figure this one out — I’ve seen other sites simply tell the users not to do this and use the same email, and I don’t think that’ll be a friendly behavior. Right now, I look to see if the user is already logged into RJ and determine it based on that.
• Oh, this post would not be complete without a great Internet Explorer story. So if parts of your site runs on SSL, then you need to include the SSL versions of Facebook’s Javascript files (which in turn pulls in the SSL versions of images, css, etc that it needs). The reason for this is to avoid the classic “this page both contains secure and non-secure items” from IE. So what happens when you use the SSL resources from Facebook? A big, ugly, show-stopping Javascript error (and why does it have to be about Flash?). The reason I mentioned earlier you are the mercy of FB is because I think this used to work, and they updated their JS library recently as the bugs just started showing up for people the last few weeks. My answer for now: no SSL pages for in IE — IE users don’t really care about security, do they?

Anyways, now that my integration is complete, I’m looking forward in doing more things such as publishing to the news feed. And did anyone say Facebook Connect with iPhone?

• Everything is faster, especially app load times. Even my old iMac from years ago, which I always dreaded using because of what seemed like hard drive thrashing, now performs very well.
• Quicktime has the biggest UI change — and it’s okay. For me though, I need to use Quicktime 7 Pro because of the export options that I use for Radio Javan’s music videos, and Snow Leopard still includes this in the Utilities directory.
• Finder has been completely re-written taking advantage of the new libraries (will they ever rewrite iTunes?). I know this because I’ve read it, but also it is slightly more responsive.
• The new Expose that let’s you do show only windows within a specific app is pretty cool.
• After install, I had gigs of hard drive space freed up on both my machines.
• I admit, the new wallpapers (the two of the Snow Leopards) are pretty cool.

Since Snow Leopard is basically just a rewrite & rework of Leopard, there’s not much that’s going to awe you. But for only $30, Apple made a great choice by avoiding the feature creep that shows up on every new OS. They decided to go back and improve everything under the hood. I know the word “refactor” scares many of us, but I hope more software developers take notice.

But the most important question is what the requirements of the project you’re working on is. Often developers end up using a language/framework that they’re familiar with (which is a valid consideration). Other times we like to try out a new language on a project just to learn something new. Just be careful always to keep the requirements of the project in mind.

Java

As a language, Java is great, there’s not much wrong with it. When you use it properly, it lends itself to use good design patterns. One of it’s downsides is that it takes more lines of code to do something in Java than a dynamic language. The JVM, however, is a beauty — it’s fast, stable, and self-optimizes. But for me when I think of Java I shudder because of the “enterprise” stigma attached to it. There’s so many frameworks and libraries out there, and it’s very easy to over-architect your project and end up using a framework that at the end of the day doesn’t perform and becomes bulky. It’s not Java that’s the problem, it’s misuse and misunderstanding of the frameworks that can make your project overly-complicated.

These days I never choose Java when I think about doing a web project, there’s simply many better choices. However, if I was doing a highly transactional application (such as financial or telecomm), then Java would be my choice.

Ruby

Let’s face it, Ruby on Rails is a great framework, and it’s what made Ruby popular. If you diss it because it’s “too slow” for a website, then you just haven’t done your research. The simplicity of Ruby is what makes Rails work, even though there have been copies of the Rails framework made for other languages. And actually, I really enjoy the development community around Ruby, they really are pushing out great stuff. The one downside (if you can call it that) is that there are so many updates made to the Rails framework that you always have to try and keep up so you’re doing things the “Rails way”.

While Ruby and Rails both make things easier for the developer, that doesn’t mean that everyone can just write a Rails app and so there’s no “skill” involved. The simplicity provides the developer to think about higher-level problems such as better database models, good design and application flow, and a more intuitive UI.

Objective-C

Ahh, not many people choose this ever, but if you ever have coded for OS X or the iPhone you will have done Objective-C. The language is C-based and more or less straight forward. The OO-syntax is kinda funky, but once you get used to it, it’s fun to use. The big downside for me is that I always find myself having to use some libraries that are C or C++ based inside my Objective-C project. This makes it very confusing when writing code, trying to remember how a method or object should be invoked.. and never mind the difference of memory management between the 3 languages. But I’m not a complete expert on Objective-C, so I may just be doing things wrong.

By the way, the article that I’m writing here was inspired from reading my buddy Amro’s opinion on Objective-C.

Javascript

Obviously JS is used these days mostly within browsers. In fact, the most painful experiences I’ve had in software development has come from worrying about different JS implementation across modern browsers. But sometimes it’s not the exact JS language implementation as opposed to more subtle things such as performance and DOM manipulation.

I’ll be honest, I enjoy writing JS these days, it’s not that terrible. I know there’s many non-web projects that even try to run JS as the back-end server, and why not? After all, JS of course is really a dialect of ECMAScript.

Thank you for being an XM subscriber. We are dedicated to providing our subscribers with the best programming and listener experience available on radio today. As part of this commitment, we have an important update regarding your XM subscription.

Music royalty rights were established by the U.S. Congress as part of the Copyright Act. This Act requires payment of copyright music royalties to recording artists, musicians and recording companies who hold copyrights in sound recordings.

These royalties have recently increased dramatically, principally as a result of a decision made by the Copyright Royalty Board, which is designated by the Library of Congress to set royalty rates for sound recordings. Beginning on July 29, 2009, a “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” of $1.98/month* for primary subscriptions and $.97/month* for multi-receiver subscriptions will be effective upon your next renewal. This fee will be used directly to offset increased payments from XM to the recording industry.

Unfortunately, we cannot control the Copyright Royalty Board’s rate increase, but we can offer you ways to save on your subscription. The longer your subscription, the more you save!Thank you for being an XM subscriber. We are dedicated to providing our subscribers with the best programming and listener experience available on radio today. As part of this commitment, we have an important update regarding your XM subscription.

Music royalty rights were established by the U.S. Congress as part of the Copyright Act. This Act requires payment of copyright music royalties to recording artists, musicians and recording companies who hold copyrights in sound recordings.

These royalties have recently increased dramatically, principally as a result of a decision made by the Copyright Royalty Board, which is designated by the Library of Congress to set royalty rates for sound recordings. Beginning on July 29, 2009, a “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” of $1.98/month* for primary subscriptions and $.97/month* for multi-receiver subscriptions will be effective upon your next renewal. This fee will be used directly to offset increased payments from XM to the recording industry.

Unfortunately, we cannot control the Copyright Royalty Board’s rate increase, but we can offer you ways to save on your subscription. The longer your subscription, the more you save!

Live Blogs/Sites

• Huffington Post – The most updated blog source, the author gathers info from other blogs, articles, Tweets, Youtube videos, and email readers.
• NIAC – Only English live blog that’s written by Iranians. The information here is more accurate & confirmed than other sites.
• The Daily Dish – Great collection of posts, has many op-ed articles.
• Guardian Blog – They’ve been having a new live-blog everyday, and they link to many interesting BBC posts.
• Mousavi’s Official Site – This is in Persian, there’s been “rumors” that the site has been hacked, but it looks like those were false.
• Mousavi’s Facebook Page – We don’t know who the admin of this page is. It’s fairly accurate, but not everything should be considered as official posts.

Twitter

• http://twitter.com/iranbaan – Mostly in Persian, probably the most reliable & confirmed account on Twitter. Very up-to-date.
• http://twitter.com/tehranbureau – Cites many sources from Iran, not always confirmed news.
• http://twitter.com/persiankiwi – I can’t tell where this user is from, but the info is more or less accurate.
• http://twitter.com/jimsciuttoABC – Reliable ABC News Reporter who was in Iran during the elections.
• http://twitter.com/LaraABCNews – Reliable ABC News Reporter.
• #iranelection Search – This is, of course, the top trending topic on Twitter for the last 2 weeks. You can search & find many postings here. Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to confirm anything. There are also many pro-govt accounts who are posting fake info.

Photos

• http://twitpic.com/photos/madyar – Updated postings, many of them graphic.
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mousavi1388
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/kosoof

There are many other sources of information from Persian-only news sites, but I figure other Iranians know where to go for that info instead of me posting them here. I believe this whole situation will take many months to resolve itself, and there will be times that the flow of information or photos/videos will be slow. If you have other good site suggestions, please share them in the comments!

+ New Look & Design
+ Browse and Play Persian Music Videos On WiFi or 3G
+ Search Through Hundreds of Music Videos
+ Listen to Show and DJ Podcasts
+ Added Option for Lower Quality Radio Stream
+ Added Option to Disable Screen Auto-Lock
+ Adjust Volume Using Device Controls

That’s right, we have just put our ENTIRE collection of music videos on the iPhone app giving you easy access wherever you are. And if you are using WiFi, you’ll be able to view the videos in high quality. You can now also catch up with the latest podcasts on-demand by streaming them from the app.

We’ve also improved our radio player, by giving the design a little update to keep it fresh as well as improved streaming quality. And since we’ve had so many requests for this, there is now an option for a lower quality radio stream (96k), so that if you are somewhere with poor cell coverage, you still would have a chance to listen.