Facebook Updates Their Galleries
Posted by Nick O'Neill on December 9th, 2007 4:06 PMFacebook has apparently added AJAX to their photo galleries. A number of people (including Owen Thomas of Valleywag) have emailed me about the update. When you click through the photos in each gallery, they load practically instantly. This resembles the classic lightbox gallery style. Lightbox has always cached the previous and next photo to enable faster loading times.
Owen also pointed out that some of the photos now use the subdomain “ll” which references limelight’s caching services. This partnership isn’t actually new so my guess is that they simply added another photo server. This minor change greatly improves Facebook’s gallery feature.
Facebook appears to consistently make minor changes to their user interface to improve the user experience. I’m looking forward to the larger changes such as contact grouping and multi-language support. Who knows when those updates will take place!
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December 9th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
I don’t think I would really count that as AJAX.
To be considered as proper AJAX, it has to use the XMLHttpRequest (or
the IE equivalent). However, what Facebook has done is put all the
data for the entire photo album on the page when you load it. Open up
an image, and look at the pages, source. Near the bottom of the page,
you’ll see inside a tag, something like this:
onloadRegister(function() {new Photostream($(”myphoto”),
“http://photos-d.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p …
This is probably what I would have done as well. I think it’s great.
December 9th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I don’t think I would really count that as AJAX.
To be considered as proper AJAX, it has to use the XMLHttpRequest (or
the IE equivalent). However, what Facebook has done is put all the
data for the entire photo album on the page when you load it. Open up
an image, and look at the pages, source. Near the bottom of the page,
you’ll see inside a tag, something like this:
onloadRegister(function() {new Photostream($(”myphoto”),
“http:\/\/photos-d.ak.facebook.com\/photos-ak-sf2p …
This is probably what I would have done as well. I think it’s great.
December 9th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
[...] photo galleries just got better. The photo pages now have an Ajax interface, which let the images load faster. But what is good for Facebook users may not be good for Facebook, at least in the short term. As [...]
December 9th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Yeah, this is awesome, I wrote in about it and wasn’t sure if I was crazy or not. iPhone users have enjoyed this for sometime now and it’s nice to see it finally make it to the full site.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Yeah, this is awesome, I wrote in about it and wasn’t sure if I was crazy or not. iPhone users have enjoyed this for sometime now and it’s nice to see it finally make it to the full site.
December 9th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
[...] Facebook se sont ameliorées. Ces pages possèdent désormais une interface en Ajax qui permet un chargement plus rapide des photos. Mais ce qui est bon pour les utilisateurs ne l’est peut-être pas pour Facebook. [...]
December 10th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Great point Dan. Thanks for pointing out that it isn’t completely AJAX. It is instead a javascript preloading script. Regardless, it makes things a lot smoother!
December 10th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Great point Dan. Thanks for pointing out that it isn’t completely AJAX. It is instead a javascript preloading script. Regardless, it makes things a lot smoother!
December 10th, 2007 at 2:19 am
Finally. Smoothness is definitely a plus.
December 10th, 2007 at 3:19 am
Finally. Smoothness is definitely a plus.
December 10th, 2007 at 9:12 am
now if only they’ll add that option to let you choose only specific individual/contact(s) to view your photo albums. the “only friends” option is not sufficient. facebook really needs to learn from multiply in the photos department.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:12 am
now if only they’ll add that option to let you choose only specific individual/contact(s) to view your photo albums. the “only friends” option is not sufficient. facebook really needs to learn from multiply in the photos department.
December 10th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
I clearly remember a discussion with my mom back in the 90’s about the potential of javascript preloading scripts. I thought at the time that she was crazy, but apparently she was right on! The poof is in the prudding when it comes to smooth graphic interfaces. And no… it really isn’t straight AJAX, but who cares?
December 10th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
I clearly remember a discussion with my mom back in the 90’s about the potential of javascript preloading scripts. I thought at the time that she was crazy, but apparently she was right on! The poof is in the prudding when it comes to smooth graphic interfaces. And no… it really isn’t straight AJAX, but who cares?
December 11th, 2007 at 2:26 am
[...] photo galleries just got better. The photo pages now have an Ajax interface, which let the images load faster. But what is good for Facebook users may not be good for Facebook, at least in the short term. As [...]