iLike Team Blog

Update to the iLike app on Facebook

We want to share some news about changes to the iLike app on the Facebook platform.
 
Facebook announced a change to its platform to stop the inadvertent sharing of User IDs via the HTTP Referrer header for all apps.  When Facebook announced this initiative, iLike immediately implemented the change and Facebook User IDs are no longer being passed via the Referrer header from the iLike App.
 
We encourage you to review the Facebook blog posting http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/431  on this issue and if you have any questions, to contact us with feedback at [email protected]

Breaking News: iLike Joins Forces With MySpace & Sells Music In-Page

It’s a very big day for the extended iLike community. We’re thrilled to announce that MySpace has entered into an agreement to acquire iLike.

On a personal note, it’s a humbling moment for Ali and me. We’ve always used MySpace as a benchmark to measure our own progress in the online world of social music. Having built the most popular music services on the other social networks, we never imagined that we’d someday team up with MySpace, and we’re excited to see what we can accomplish as one team.

In the short term we’ll be focused on collaborating with our friends at MySpace, who share our commitment to helping fans discover content and connect with artists online, to make our social music discovery platform even more powerful. By joining forces with MySpace, we think we can provide an unmatched social music platform to help you discover music and connect with your favorite artists.

The iLike.com website and applications will continue to operate as they always have – except that we’ll be working to make them even better in the weeks and months to come.

Pictured in photo from left to right: Ali Partovi, Mike Jones (COO of MySpace), Owen Van Natta (CEO of MySpace), Nat Brown, Hadi Partovi

And that’s not the only big iLike development in the last few days. iLike is now enabling music fans who discover and share music on iLike to purchase songs and albums (in MP3 format) in-page directly from iLike.com.

Our MP3 download service is currently in Beta on iLike.com, meaning that we’ll continue to improve it as we get feedback from users and artists. Our goal over time is to offer music fans the ability to impulse buy in-page from wherever they are.

Change is exciting, but we know it can also cause anxiety – even when the developments are good. We’ll continue to update you here when there is anything new or noteworthy to share. We value your ongoing support and we welcome your feedback.

Ali & Hadi Partovi, co-founders of iLike

Check out our iPhone apps – Challenge, Concerts & Artists

We just announced a mobile version of one of our most addictive and popular features, the iLike Challenge. Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can download the iLike Challenge app today to test your musical knowledge and play real time against friends (two players can even play against one another on the same device).

We also recently launched our enhanced Local Concerts App, which is already the #1 free concert app on the iPhone/iPod. We simultaneously announced that more than 250 artists have launched custom iPhone apps using our platform.

The Local Concerts app by iLike lists upcoming shows in a user’s area and provides links to buy tickets. The new upgrade (available soon pending Apple approval) adds 2 key features to make it the must-have app for anybody who enjoys live music:

• Personalization: The app scans the music on your iPod or iPhone and provides custom concert listings to match.

• Notifications: We alert you on your phone whenever an artist in your music collection announces a local concert.

To download one of our iPhone apps, or if you’re an artist and you want to join hundreds of others who have created a custom iPhone app using iLike, go to: www.iLike.com/mobile

To learn more, check out these screencasts: 

Local Concerts

Artist app

The Reviews Are In:

“iLike’s pushtastic iPhone app lets you know when your favorite bands are coming to town . . . iLike is launching a new iPhone application today that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 update’s new features in some of the best ways that we’ve seen yet. Dubbed ‘Local Concerts’, the application lets you follow any artist you’d like and receive alerts whenever they announce that they’re coming to a local venue. For anyone who has ever tried to keep tabs on their local music scene, this is going to be a must-have.”
-- TechCrunch

“Bands on the prowl for a quick and reasonable way to commission a custom iPhone app finally have a place to go. Music discovery service iLike, which gained a large following with its Facebook app, is providing musicians with an automated system for creating and managing their own downloadable iPhone applications . . . Already, more than 300,000 musical acts use iLike to manage their website profiles or Facebook app pages. The iPhone piece ties in with that system, meaning once a band uploads a tour date, it's blasted out to all three platforms.”
-- The Los Angeles Times

iLike Builds iPhone Apps for Artists and Integrates With Twitter, YouTube, MySpace & More

This morning we made the biggest product announcement in iLike’s history.

We’ve taken our ‘Post Once, Publish Everywhere” syndication model to a new level by empowering the more than 300,000 artists who use the iLike Artist Dashboard to maintain an active presence on even more of the leading consumer destinations via a single dashboard.

Specifically, iLike is expanding to Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and beyond. We also launched a turnkey system to enable any artist to rapidly create and distribute their own iPhone app featuring their concert dates, photos, blogs, bulletins, and videos.

What this means for artists is that anytime they post new content, in addition to the iLike network of leading widgets and plugins, we'll now update their Facebook and MySpace pages, we'll submit the content to their YouTube channel, we'll tweet about it on the artist’s behalf, it will show up on their official Ticketmaster page, we’ll update their official dotcom website, and lastly it will show up in their iLike-built iPhone app.

And of course we’ll monetize this music discovery by offering prominent “buy” links to empower musicians to sell music and concert tickets. Additionally, we launched a Premium Stats Service so artists can get detailed reporting on fan interactions with their content across our syndication network.

What this means for fans is that it will be simple and fun for them to connect with their favorite artists on even more of the leading consumer destinations, including the hottest mobile device on the planet: the iPhone.

"Twitter is helping people discover and share what's happening right now in all aspects of their lives," said Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter. "iLike enriches a growing ecosystem by making it easy to find and follow our favorite artists on Twitter—and for them to form a deeper connection with us."

We’re thrilled with the early response we’ve received from artists and fans. We look forward to sharing more related news with you in the coming weeks.

Finally, I’d like to thank and congratulate the iLike team for building an unrivaled suite of new features for artists while making it even easier for fans and musicians to connect online.

And one more thing: iLike now has more than 45mm users. That works out to approximately 2mm users per full-time employee. Wow! We are awed by iLike’s rapid growth rate. Thank you for your support.

To learn more, go to: www.iLike.com/manage or you can read the press release.

-- Hadi Partovi
President of iLike

Tap This!

The past few months, we've been pretty excited about our success in promoting new album releases and concert tours, and the press seems to have noticed too. (See "Is There an iLike Effect?").  Every single album we've promoted in the past year, whether by iconic stars or emerging artists, has debuted in the iTunes Top 10 Albums, and most of them in the top 3.

And now we're eager to see whether iLike can lend the same support to a music game.  With that in mind, we're delighted to be promoting the new release of Tap Tap Revenge: Coldplay Edition across all of iLike's channels. If you have an iPhone and you like music, you're no doubt already familiar with Tap Tap Revenge, the #1 iPhone app.  And now you can play your favorite iPhone game along to Coldplay's greatest hits.

We're giving the 2.9 million Coldplay fans on iLike something to tap about :)

Add Social Playlists to Any Website

You have probably heard about Google’s Friend Connect service that enables any Web site to easily add social features. Designed to drive traffic and increase engagement by encouraging social interaction, Friend Connect is as simple to use as copying and pasting html codes.

As the leader in social music discovery, we have used Google's Friend Connect service to build a "social playlist" gadget, which launched today. This new feature empowers any Web site owner to add a playlist to his/her site. The social hook is that visitors to a participating Web site can "log in" (via Friend Connect) to edit these dynamic playlists by adding songs.

And it’s perfectly simple to create a playlist. You simply copy and paste the html code to add songs from iLike’s vast music catalog to a playlist.

An engaged couple can use this feature to invite friends and family to come to their wedding planning Web site to help create a playlist for the wedding reception. Or an artist can invite his fans to create music playlists on their personal Web sites featuring his newest song, thereby encouraging social music discovery and consumption online.

Check out the playlist we built in less than ten minutes using our new playlist gadget:

From a strategic perspective, we are bringing iLike to every eyeball instead of trying to bring every eyeball to iLike. More importantly, fans and artists can now rely on iLike to manage and syndicate their music on the leading social networks worldwide as well as on individual Web sites.

To add a social playlist to your Web site, go to http://www.google.com/friendconnect and sign up to add social gadgets.

To create and add a regular (non-social) playlist to your Web site  or blog, visit http://www.ilike.com/playlist

iLike launches developer platform for music, partners include Google, Evite, Slide, Flixster

We just announced a platform for any Web site or application developer to add interactive music features, with very little engineering effort, just a few lines of HTML and JavaScript.

Having spent years building the underlying technology for iLike's music service, we decided to help other developers use our underlying technology, without difficult coding, without much server-side engineering, and without having to understand the hassles and complexities of the world's vast catalog of music.

With the iLike Developer Platform, creating interactive music features for your Web site is something that can now be done in a matter of minutes! Meanwhile, our system respects the rights of copyright owners, thanks to our partnerships with Rhapsody and other music providers.

You can check out our developer platform here: http://developer.iLike.com.

Our launch partners include Google, Evite, Slide, Flixster, SixApart/Typepad, and dozens of Facebook application developers including SGN, WaterCooler, MesmoTV, Carpool/Zimride, ConnectedWeddings, Jambool, and more.

Example screenshots from our partners:

Each of these partners can add music features for very little work.

• Evite will allow every invitation to include a group-editable playlist.
• Google's Blogger and SixApart's TypePad - the 2 most popular blogging tools on the Web - will enable bloggers to add playlists to their blog with just a click from their widget gallery.
• Flixster will enable their community to add soundtracks to every movie page.
• SGN's FreeGifts app on Facebook will enable adding a song to any gift
• The Watercooler TV show fan clubs will enable the community to add soundtracks for each show
• ConnectedWeddings (on Facebook) will enable a bride and groom to collaboratively choose their wedding playlist, with suggestions from guests.
• The Carpool application on Facebook will enable carpoolers to share playlists for the ride
• MesmoTV will allow players of their celebrity game to add music to their profiles.
• Jambool's "Who Has the Cutest Baby?" Facebook app will let you share your baby's favorite tunes
• ClassTop's CourseFeed will allow students and teachers to create playlists for any college course
• and many more examples are coming!

If you are a web developer, try the iLike Developer Platform. It's still in Beta, we're improving it every week, and we want your feedback!

iLike Launches Full-Song Playback on Facebook; Chosen by Facebook as a "Great App"

The summer has been hectic and hot here at iLike. From a whirlwind 72-hour weekend office remodel to a rapid-fire series of major launches, we’ve rejected the idea of a leisurely summer. Vacations are for wimps!

What have we been up to, you ask? Here are just a few of the highlights:

• Full Length Song Streams on Facebook and iLike.com: In collaboration with Rhapsody, we’re recently launched full-song playback on our Facebook® application and iLike.com. Music fans now have access to more than 5 million full-length songs from all the major labels and hundreds of independents. Once you exhaust a monthly threshold of 25 free plays, you can either sign up for a Rhapsody account (for unlimited full-song playback) or you can return to 30 second song samples (the experience you’ve enjoyed in the past on our application). And, we’re in the process of rolling this service out on our other leading applications and platforms across the Web. To check out full song playback, go to: www.iLike.com. Or, sign up for a Rhapsody to get unlimited full song playback on iLike.

• Facebook Rewards iLike with “Great App” Status: We’re also really excited to share with you that Facebook recently selected iLike as one of two inaugural “Great Apps,” a program designed to reward applications that deliver value to users by offering meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed user experiences. As a result, Facebook will also be granting iLike special integration and increased visibility while they simultaneously crack down on spammy apps. To read more, visit our press blog.

• New Third Party Developer Program: We recently announced a new program for developers that will enable any third-party to add full songs and playlists to his/her Website, blog or application. HTML and FTML formats. To learn more, go to: www.iLike.com/developer

• New Concert Advertising Service (think “adwords for concerts”): We launched an unbelievably simple and powerful new self-serve advertising tool. Concert promoters, indie bands, venue owners and more can now buy and instantly create targeted, multi-media ads with social hooks that will be delivered to local fans who are interested in discovering live music events on iLike.com, Facebook and our other leading applications across the Web. To learn more and get started for as little as $5, go to: www.iLike.com/advertise

• More than 30 Million Users: Last but not least, we now have more than 30 million registered users (and counting!).

This rate of growth and innovation wouldn’t be possible without the continued support of our users. Thank you so much, from everyone on the iLike team, for your ongoing enthusiasm and feedback about our new endeavors.

Summer isn’t over yet. Imagine what we might do once the rain starts to fall (and fall and fall . . . ) in Seattle.

Tons of new features, and iLike hits 25mm users :)

In the last few 12 months iLike has expanded across the web beyond iLike.com to Facebook, Bebo, hi5, and Orkut, and also beyond the Web onto iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the iPhone. A year ago we had just announced 3 million users. Now, one year later, we just passed the 25 million registered user mark. Wow, what a year it's been!

Some great updates on new features we've added since our last blog post...

1) Improved, richer artist pages
The artist pages on iLike.com and across the iLike network now reflect a richer design - we've separated out the artist-uploaded content into different modules for blogs, photos, bulletins, and videos. This particularly lets you more prominently see artist-uploaded videos, since there is a lot of cool stuff that artists have uploaded. For example, in this screenshot, you can see a recent video uploaded by Jason Mraz.

2) Local concert alerts from your favorite artists 
iLike has always kept track of your favorite artists, but in the past we've sent you reminders for concerts in a rolled-up newsletter, and we heard feedback that this sometimes caused people to miss a concert since the information was lost in a bunch of other data.  Now we send you a specific email whenever one of your Artists iLike announces a concert near you (edit your location here). On iLike.com and also on Facebook, you can click "I'm going" or "I want to go", and see who else is going.

On the Facebook version of iLike, you can also invite friends to go to the concert, and see who else in your college or highschool is interested. You can also see all the upcoming local concerts your Facebook friends are going to.

3) Artist-specific quizzes
Actually, we launched this feature a while back on Facebook, but we forgot to blog about it. (oops!). You can now play the iLike Challenge for many of your favorite artists - just pick an artist, visit their page, and click the Play Now button to see how well you can name the songs by the artists. You get 10 questions, up to 100 points, and challenge your friends. :)

 

4) Music recommendations from Facebook friends
On the Facebook version of iLike, you can now recommend music to your friends each time you "iLike" it. The first person across all of Facebook to recommend any song gets a permanent badge on that song's page, but there are also slots available to be the "first" within any smaller Facebook network whether its regional, college, highschool, etc.

Since enough of your Facebook friends are already busy tagging their favorite music on iLike already, we have now started also showing rollups of this week's most popular music among your friends, in your highschool, college, region, etc. This is one of the coolest capabilities we've ever built, because it uses the full power of the social-graph of a site like Facebook, combined with the rich user<->music interactions of iLike, to built a recommendation system tailored to your tastes and your friends. :-)

Anyway, wow, that's a lot to write about, and there's even more but we know you can't read it all. It's been a BUSY month at iLike!   

To close things off, the latest "quote of the week" came from Marcus, our product manager, who handles so much email that he spends hours simply dealing with organizing it: "I think my new job is - I'm a glorified inbox rule!". (we hope Marcus will soon figure out how to set up his inbox rules to work automatically for him.)

200k artists, incl majority of the top 500!

Today we announced that 200,000+ musicians, including over half of the top 500, are now using our Universal Artist Dashboard to reach their fans across all our syndication channels: Facebook, hi5, Bebo, iTunes Sidebar, etc.  See full release.

World-renowned acts like Radiohead, Linkin Park, 50 Cent, Keith Urban and Herbie Hancock, are among the tens of thousands of artists using our "Post Once, Publish Everywhere" platform to syndicate their songs, videos, photos, fan bulletins, concert information and exclusive content.

To show off some of the coolest things that artists have been doing using iLike, we put together a "greatest hits" video -- check it out :)

NEW: Song and Artist Tagging
This week, we finally enabled tagging for songs and artists inside iLike on Facebook.

Quote of the Week
“iLike is all about community and the ability to discover new artists, and music, through word of mouth. And the chance to share my music in order to expand that community is what it’s all about; not to mention the relationship can be more immediate and direct with my audience.”
--Keith Urban

On the iPhone... and beyond

First, apologies to those who subscribe to this blog by email (powered by Feedburner). A bug in Feedburner caused everybody to get emailed last week for no reason. Accept our apologies. :(

iLike on the iPhone
Now for the fun stuff... we just announced that iLike is now on the iPhone!  Well, it's not all of iLike. We've just started doing stuff on the iPhone, we built features we think are most useful to have on-the-go, and we'll improve it over time. (See TechCrunch coverage)

To try it, visit iLike.com from your iPhone. The main features are

• Music newsfeed (updates from favorite artists)
• Local concert calendar.

Within the next week or so we will also add improved personalization, so you will soon be able to pick artists to hear from, or use your iLike.com or Facebook login to personalize iLike on the iPhone.

Expansion beyond Facebook to other social networks
In other news, iLike has passed 22 million registered users. Much of this growth has been due to our expansion of iLike into other social networks: Bebo.com and hi5.com. If you are a user of these social networks, check out iLike on Bebo, or iLike on hi5. Thanks to the Google OpenSocial platform we hope to soon offer iLike's popular features within Orkut and MySpace as well.

Lastly, this weeks' quote of the week comes from Maggie, talking about the joys of working at a startup vs a big corporation: "Once you go little, you can't go back". Sorry to embarrass you Maggie! :-)

New iLike.com Sidebar Release

We just released a new version of the iLike Sidebar for both Windows (released Dec. 17th) and Mac (released Dec. 18th). Thanks to your feedback, we were able to find and fix a few problems that some of our users were experiencing, namely errors while installing.

If you've been having problems with the sidebar, please try downloading and installing this newest version of the Sidebar, which can always be found on our download page. If you're not having any problems with the Sidebar, there's no need to worry about this - we will soon upgrade you to the latest version automatically. 

Please feel free to leave us any feedback in the comments to this blog post; and if you're having a technical problem, please contact iLike support. Your feedback helps us make iLike better for everyone!

From all of us at iLike, Happy Holidays!   :-)

- Cassie

Monumental upgrade to iLike Sidebar - for iTunes, WindowsMedia, and Mac

We can't say enough how excited we are about the latest iLike Sidebar - for iTunes, for WindowsMedia Player, Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS/X Tiger or Leopard - we have released all of these simultaneously:  download it here!

Note: most existing users will be auto-updated to the newest version, but not immediately. If you're reading this blog, upgrade now! :)

What's new: live updates from your favorite artists
As you listen to music in iTunes or Windows Media Player, you see live updates from the artist you're currently listening to - bulletins, concert alerts, album releases, new music, and new videos.

See the screenshot to see what the iLike Sidebar displays while listening to different artists (all of whom are posting content using the iLike Universal Artist Dashboard):

Artists: starting today, every time you upload a song, enter concert information, or post a multimedia iCast bulletin, the iLike "post-once, publish everywhere" system will automatically display this information in the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media.

Happy Thanksgiving

It's been an insanely busy couple of months here at iLike. Between working on the iLike application on Facebook, improving the Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player, and integrating iLike with multiple new social networks such as Orkut, Bebo, and others... there has been a lot to do!

We keep some sanity around the office by having some fun... and sometimes making a little noise. This week's quote of the week captures a little piece of it. Hadi, our President & COO was a concerned about the noise in the office and asked us:

"I want to get a sense of how the group feels about the noise level in the office (for me this includes things like flying helicopters, the rock band playing after 5, or dogs spinning around growling, or anything at similar volume levels)."

I for one am thankful this Thanksgiving for working at a cool enough place for such a question to arise. Happy Thanksgiving from iLike.

-Aydin

Keith Urban collaboration; iLike drives 3x growth in music buying

Late last week we announced an exciting, ongoing collaboration with Keith Urban, the GRAMMY® award-winning musician, songwriter and performer. Throughout the duration of his popular tour, Keith will create weekly video posts exclusively for iLike and his online fan community using our iCast™ multi-media blogging tools. The videos will feel like an all access backstage pass, documenting what it’s really like to be on the road and behind-the-scenes with superstar Keith Urban.

To celebrate the announcement, a select group of iLike users were invited to attend Keith’s concert in Chicago on November 16. These lucky fans attended a private performance in Keith’s backstage lounge, went to sound check, posed for a group photo with Keith, and were given amazing seats in the AllState Arena. For those of us who were in attendance, it was a special night that we will never forget. The best part is, Keith let the fans film their experiences and the footage will soon be available, along with Keith’s first iCast video post, on Keith Urban's iLike Artist Page.

This is the just the latest example of a major artist leveraging the power of iLike to communicate directly with fans across the Web. Keith and all artists can now take a video using a cameraphone and post it instantly to their Artist Page for immediate syndication on iLike.com, Facebook and beyond; We refer to it as “Post Once, Publish Everywhere” using the iLike Universal Artist Dashboard.

In other news, we recently received exciting preliminary results from a research collaboration indicating that using the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player results in a 250% increase in a user’s music-purchasing within a month of using the iLike service.

These results are a powerful validation of our business model; Our vision is to give every artist a channel to communicate directly with anybody who likes their music while fostering music discovery and acquisition. It’s no surprise, given this new data, that iLike is one of the leading iTunes and Ticketmaster affiliates. Update: The research study results are now available on the iLike press release blog.

OpenSocial - opening new doors, making new friends

We have exciting news - Google recently pulled together a group of companies around a set of common APIs, dubbed OpenSocial - an open platform for building social applications across the Web. Naturally, iLike is among the first companies to jump on this opportunity, and we plan to build a full suite of music services that will plug in to all the networks that have already announced they will support OpenSocial, including Orkut, MySpace and Hi5.

This is great news for our growth -- we just passed 15 million users, but this new platform lets us build services for a multitude of networks with a collective audience of more than 200 million users.

And this is especially great for the artists who use the iLike Artist Services Platform to cultivate and communicate with their fanbases. Any artist who registers a page on iLike will soon be able to automatically reach their fans across iLike.com, Facebook, Ticketmaster, Ask.com, iTunes, Windows Media Player, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, and more!

Happy Birthday iLike! :-)

As of yesterday iLike.com is one-year-old. Happy Birthday iLike! What a year it has been - Since our initial launch, our growth on Facebook, and the recent announcement of iLike's Artist Services platform, the past year has felt like a whirlwind of activity for us.

And here's a nice coincidence - as of this week, iLike now has 15,000,000 registered users! 

Talk about a nice birthday present. We can't say often enough how lucky we feel to have built something that so many people use, and we thank all our users for their feedback which motivates us to continue innovating and improving.

New: album release updates - on Facebook and on iLike.com!
Our latest new feature: album release updates!  You will see a note about new album releases by your favorite artists everywhere you see artist activity today: on the iLike.com home page (registered users only), on iLike on Facebook, and soon in the iLike.com newsletter and in the iLike Sidebar!

This week's quote of the week is "oops". That's our apology for a typo in an earlier post where we announced iLike's new social media charts which will be syndicated by Billboard. We accidentally wrote it as if these are the first ever charts of social music - and some of you aptly pointed out that many companies have had music charts for a long time (including iLike! - we announced our first charts on Jan 22 on this blog). What we meant to say is: this is the first time Billboard Magazine is publishing social media based music charts. We're excited that Billboard chose iLike as the authoritative source on social music (another nice birthday present). If you were upset by the typo, please accept our apology. :-)

iLike and Billboard Join Forces to Produce Social Media Charts

We have some exciting news to share! We just made an exciting joint announcement with Billboard, the premiere music industry publication and the world's most trusted brand for music charts.

Billboard has agreed to syndicate two new iLike music charts:

• Weekly top songs added on Facebook
• Weekly top songs added on iTunes / Windows MediaPlayer

To put this news into perspective, these are Billboard's first-ever social media based charts. Both weekly charts will draw upon the massive volume of daily music activity that iLike tracks across the Internet. We expect these charts will become important industry tools.

Here's what Billboard's vice president and editorial director of the digital division had to say about this multi-tiered chart and content initiative: "The popularity of iLike makes this data a compelling tool for music lovers to discover new music as well as for marketers to track audience trendlines,” said Scott McKenzie, Billboard's parent company. “We’re thrilled to be bringing the music and social media industries together in such an innovative way.” 

As part of this announcement, Billboard will also provide live newsfeeds to iLike.com and iLike on Facebook.

For more details, please read the press release.

The iLike Sidebar for Windows Media Player!

We just launched the iLike Sidebar with a single install that works across Windows and Mac, iTunes and Windows Media Player, and iLike.com or iLike-on-Facebook!

Facebook users, get it here: 
http://apps.facebook.com/ilike/download

iLike.com users, get it here:
http://iLike.com/download

This new Sidebar also combines your iLike.com friend-list and your Facebook friendlist, to show you what all your friends are listening to.

Thank you to all the Windows Media Player users who waited patiently for this release, and please let us know if you find any issues!

New on Facebook: my friends' music, my friends' concerts:
Users of iLike on Facebook now can see their friends' music and friends' concerts:

   

New for artists: weekly stats newsletter
Artists who sign up for the iLike Artist Services Platform now get a weekly update of stats on how their music is used. For more info, see our Artist Services blog.

In other news, iLike.com is only one week away from it's 1-year anniversary, and we're also 1-week away from that magical milestone of 15,000,000 users. If we're lucky we'll hit 15mm on our birthday! :)

Linking iLike.com/Facebook accounts, and new features for artists

Merge your iLike and Facebook accounts
We've been collecting requests for this forever, and we're finally there (or at least 95% there).

If you have an account on iLike.com and on the iLike application in Facebook, you can finally link your two accounts and we will properly sync the data between the two.

What this will do:

• Merge (and sync) your Songs iLike on Facebook and on iLike
• Merge (and sync) your iLike Challenge score on Facebook and on iLike
• Display your iTunes playlists on your Facebook music page (if you use the iLike Sidebar for iTunes).
• Coming soon: merge (and sync) your Artists iLike on Facebook and on iLike

So if you haven't already, link your iLike.com account to your Facebook.com account !! :)

In other news, we have made a ton of other improvements to iLike.com and on Facebook - for music lovers and for musicians:

Improved Charts
We now have lots of new music charts. On iLike.com we added the "songs most added in iTunes and Windows Media Player. On Facebook we have the same charts as iLike.com, but we also show charts of songs-most-added to profiles, and songs-most-dedicated.

See the new chart on iLike.com
See the 8 new iLike charts on Facebook

Updates from your favorite artists - in your Facebook newsfeed
The picture says it all - you will get alerted in your Facebook newsfeed when your favorite artists announce concerts, post videos, add free MP3s, etc


Various features for musicians on the iLike Artist Services Platform

• Artists who sign up to use the iLike Artist Services Platform now have access to stats for how many times there songs are added to profiles or dedicated to friends on Facebook.
• We've added the ability to upload 30-second clips for songs where you feel unsure about uploading the full song stream
• You can now send iCasts on the road - with Mobile iCast you can post video/audio/photos to your artist page with no setup required!
• iCast messages can now include HTML formatting including links
• When you post stuff to your artist page your fans are alerted in their Artist Activity and Facebook newsfeed

International concerts, and artist iCasts

We made a number of improvements to iLike.com and iLike on Facebook, but 3 are particularly worthy of mention:

1) Broader international concert coverage
iLike concerts include not only the United States and Canada, but we just added the UK, Ireland, Australia. We have imported all Ticketmaster concerts for the UK, Ireland, Australia, and we've enabled user-entered events in these countries as well to grow our concert coverage. Thanks for your patience on this, and we will continue to add other countries too. Also, guess what - iLike on Facebook now has venue maps!

2) Artists-iLike "quilts" for Facebook users
This feature that iLike.com users have had forever is now available for your Facebook profile as well.

3) Artists are posting multimedia bulletins with iCast
We've started enabling artists to communicate with their fans on iLike via iCast bulletins. iCast is like a combination of blogging, YouTube and MySpace Bulletins - it allows an artist to post writing, photos, audio, or video to their page. To see examples of this in use, visit the pages for these artists:

• Jason Mraz - blog post and photo
• KT Tunstall - personal video excerpts from her new DVD

Finally, for the many many users who have asked for us to link their iLike.com and Facebook accounts - we've started this process and will complete it over the next 4-6 weeks. To try it out, make sure you are logged in to iLike.com, add the iLike service within Facebook, and then click to link your two accounts. We will roll out a more "proper" announcement of this later, but you heard it first on the iLike team blog. :-)

iDrink therefore iLike

On Thursday Sep 6, iLike held a private party in the Bay Area to celebrate our recent growth and to toast Facebook for creating the platform that made our success possible. Attendees   included several dozen Facebook employees, as well as people from Slide, RockYou, Apple / iTunes, iMeem, Ticketmaster.

About 25 iLike employees and contractors flew in for the event, from Seattle as well as Houston, NY, Iowa, and Southern California.

The highlight of the night was a surprise intimate performance by Third Eye Blind.... Well, that and the mustaches: a large contingency of iLike's male employees grew mustaches for the event.  Why?  Why not.

iLike now has 10,000,000 registered users! :-)

The big news today: iLike now has over 10,000,000 registered users. Thank you everybody to your feedback, support, and help in reaching this incredible milestone. We're just a few weeks shy of our 10-month birthday, it's pretty incredible to be at this size already, thank you!

We made a bunch of updates last night - a few small things in response to user feedback: we improved the genre categorization on the Music Challenge (although there's more we can do here), and we've fixed some bugs in how we add up users' playcounts from their iLike Sidebar.

The big new feature: user-entered concert listings
We have (cautiously) opened up our concert listings to enable user-entered concert information. We are now allowing users to add concert listings to our database - so from now on if you're frustrated that a concert you're attending is missing in the list, you can add it yourself! :-)

(Please don't abuse this feature, we already built a bunch of tools to automatically detect and stop abuse. And also, sadly our concert listings are still limited to the US and Canada - we know, we know, give us a few more weeks on this)

Finally, this week's quote of the week:

Eugene: the new metadata system is designed for no data loss, bla fault-tolerant bla bla bla

Hadi: hmm, well you better not let Ray anywhere near that system!

(Ray achieved infamy on our team for accidentally tripping up a critical system and causing a brief outage along with some data loss :-) )

FINALLY: Different Genres for the iLike Challenge!

This has easily been the single most requested feature we've had (across iLike.com and iLike-on-Facebook).

It has taken a LOT of work to put this together, and while it took a complete re-write under-the-hood, the visible difference on the iLike challenge is just a few links:

But we know these few links will make a huge difference for LOTS of people. We have only added three genres for now, we know people will want more. Fortunately the infrastructure will allow us to add lots of other genres to the challenge, although if you ask for a new genre don't be surprised if we ask for your help in creating the questions! :-)

The other pretty big difference is an improvement we made on iLike.com: now everytime you play a "full song" on the iLike.com website (songs uploaded by the artists themselves), if you play the song to completion it will register among your Recent Plays on your profile, so you can track Recent Plays on your profile even if you don't have the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media. :)

Also today we released a pretty significant improvement for the artists on iLike: all artists pages have an "other links" module that an artist can use to link to your official website, MySpace page, or pages for selling CDs, ringtones, t-shirts, etc

Lastly, this week's quote of the week comes from our product manager Aydin, while in the middle of an IM chat with an executive at a partner company: "sorry, do you mind? I have to step away from my desk for a sex". Are c and x too close on the keyboard? or do Freudian slips happen on IM also? we'll never know :-)

p.s. for the iLike.com users waiting for us to link iLike and Facebook accounts - yes, we're still working on it. Releasing the challenge in multiple genres was (believe it or not) more highly requested.

A plethora of innovation, and over 8mm users

A lot has happened in the last month at iLike !!

iLike now has over 8mm registered users !! Back in April we started planning a party to celebrate our 2mm-user mark, and this weekend for the party we're already at 8mm. Wow! Thanks to all of you for the  support and feedback as we've scaled the product and grown the userbase.

Today we're unveiling some great consumer features and also some pretty powerful capabilities for artists:

1) Facebook users: dedicate-a-song
If you use the iLike service within Facebook, you can now dedicate a song to any friend. Whether it's a love-song for your girlfriend or boyfriend, any old favorite for your BFF, or some eighties song that somebody is still listening to, send a dedication, and it will show up automatically on your friend's Facebook profile!

2) Add multimedia to your favorite artist's page on iLike or Facebook
A few weeks ago we added a "fan wall" to every artist's page - on Facebook and on iLike. Now you can post images, audio, or video to any artist page, and it's just as easy as uploading a file.

3) Artist-entered concert data
A lot of people have asked us about expanding our ticket-coverage to include events that aren't in Ticketmaster. We've now extended iLike to allow any artist to add their own concerts to their page. This works one of two ways: (1) via the iLike Artist Dashboard (however, this is briefly an invite-only system, we're going to open it up to all artists in about a week) (2) via Garageband.com - any artist who has entered gig data on Garageband.com will see their gigs now show up on their artist page on iLike.com and on Facebook.

This week's quote of the week came from Steve, when brainstorming names for our new feature, "dedicate a song to me". We designed this feature to grow virally on Facebook, but we wanted to make sure the language is something people would understand but would also intrigue them. We had lots of options, "dedicate a song to me", "audio poke me", "add music to my jukebox", "add to my musicwall", etc. But the quote of the week was Steve's suggestion: "spank my wall" :-).  Needless to say, we stuck with "dedicate a song to me"!

Anyway, there's a lot of innovation just around the corner. The two biggest things coming up: (a) merging your iLike.com account and your Facebook account (b) different genres of music on the iLike music challenge!  We know a lot of you have been patiently awaiting these two pieces of work, they're a lot harder than we initially thought, but they're coming soon, we promise!

Small changes make a big difference

We made a bunch of small improvements this week but we know they will make a big difference for all our users and our artists! :-)

First: improved leaderboards on the iLike Music Challenge
The iLike Challenge on Facebook now has (a) a leaderboard for all my friends (b) a leaderboard for all Facebook (c) stats for the "best streak" among friends or across Facebook. We're really excited about the new "best streak" scoring on the Challenge, it's real fun. Can you get a streak over 100 points? The current best streak on Facebook is 749 points!! Try beating that!

Second: More GarageBand artists now have pages on Facebook and iLike
There's no really new user-interface here, but GarageBand artists' pages on iLike.com and on Facebook are now more consistent, and for more artists. We still have a lot of work to do here, and new stuff coming down the pike. In about a week or two we'll finally allow artists to add concert listings (including all the Garageband artist gigs), so hold on!

Third: nice summaries of all your music (or your friends') on Facebook
We've built a music profile summary for every Facebook user who uses iLike, combining your favorite artists, favorite songs, concerts, and one music video. If you're a Facebook user, check out your music profile! We will be adding to this soon, especially next up are (a) merging your iLike.com profiles into Facebook (if you use both), and (b) adding your iTunes playlists into Facebook (if you use the Sidebar).

Fourth: You can pick your "artists iLike" on Facebook
This feature has been available on iLike.com for a while, but we added it on Facebook - go to any artist page, and click the "iLike" button to add that artist to your artists iLike, and we can then notify you when that artist is on tour, etc. Go check out your current Artists iLike list and add more.

Finally, this week's quote of the week came from a small discussion between our president (Hadi) and our CEO (Ali), who are twins. After debating two sides of a point during a team offsite, Ali finally caved: "Yeah, you're right, you're right". Always humble and gracious, Hadi replied "I know :-)".  Ben of course added "You two are like a married couple".

You can now post on your favorite artist's wall! :-)

We've had a ton of new stuff in the pipeline, and we're going to be unveiling it in the next few weeks. This week's big new feature: artist walls! You can now write on your favorite artist's wall - either on iLike.com, or within Facebook! All you music lovers who have been asking for this can now use it to write comments about your favorite artists! :-)

The other big change for consumers comes exclusively inside Facebook - you can now see who's going to a concert at the individual show level - so if you're considering which night to see a particular band, you can see everybody who said they're going / wanna-go to help make your decision. For example, the screenshot on the right shows who's going to see Gwen Stefani's show tonight in Irvine, CA.

Also, we've started testing a new interface for artists & labels to access their iLike profiles and put up new photos & songs.  This interface is still in an "invite-only" mode as we work out the kinks, but some major artists like Bon Jovi, Kelly Clarkson, Young Buck, 50 Cent, Keith Urban, Faith Hill, and a plethora of SubPop artists have already posted full songs!  We hope to complete testing in the next couple weeks, and will then open it up more broadly.  In the meantime of course, anybody who doesn't want to wait can already sign up and post music/photos via our GarageBand interface for unsigned artists.

Finally, this week's quote of the week comes from our engineer Eugene talking to our PM Aydin.

Eugene: "Ben, can I borrow you for a sanity check?"

Aydin: "Uh, you may want to pick somebody other than Ben if what you need is a sanity check"

As an aside, a submission from our friend Ethan Bauman:

For those of you that don't know about Culture Bully, it's run by a guy named Chris DeLine.  Chris has been posting choice tracks and great commentary for over 2 years and has over 70,000 monthly readers.  If you haven't taken the time to peruse his blog, do yourself a favor and go check it out. You'll find commentary and music from Daft Punk, Guru, Mash-Ups and much more.

On a more somber note, Chris just got hit with a whopping $2,100 bill to have his appendix removed.  Since his only income currently comes from his blog, he's feeling pretty stressed about paying for his new appendix-free lifestyle.

We just donated $100 to him here, (http://www.culturebully.com/surgery/ ) and would like to ask you all to chip in what you can to take the pressure off of Chris.  He's been a steady and generous contributor of his time to the music community, so we hope the community will give him some love back. 

Holy cow... 6mm users and growing 300k/day!

First the big news: iLike now has 6 million users, and adding another million every few days!  We believe this makes us the Web's fastest-growing music service (see today's press release).

 

The most amazing part is our overnight success on Facebook.  The Facebook Platform enables new services to enjoy an unprecedented rate of viral growth, and our recently-launched iLike for Facebook has been kicking butt.

 

Launching just over two weeks ago, iLike on Facebook signed up a million users in its first week; then a million more in the 5 days, and another million in the next 4 days.  We're currently signing up about 300,000 new users per day.  (See graph.)

 

Could iLike on Facebook actually be the most rapidly-adopted technology launch in history?  Or top ten?  Heck, we have no idea... but it sure sounds good!  If you know of any faster-growing technology, please post it in the comments here.

 

Linking your accounts on iLike.com and Facebook

We know a lot of you are asking us how to link your iLike.com account with your new Facebook account. We're working on it!  Sorry this isn't already done -- we had to cut some corners in our mad rush to build our Facebook service, and now we're racing the clock to keep up with the traffic growth. But we know it's important and we'll get to it.

 

Recent improvements

• You can add a music video to your Facebook profile using iLike. We've also made it easier to re-order your Songs iLike or choose to put more than 5 on your profile
• We now support Canadian concert data (on iLike.com and on Facebook)
• COMING SOON: We've built a tool for musicians to upload full-length songs to their artist pages that works faster/smoother than the current model of uploading music at GarageBand.com. We're currently testing this with a small number of musicians, but we're gonna open the floodgates soon. 

iLike in the press:

here are a few recent interviews that Ali (our CEO) has done, spreading the word about iLike.  (Actually, the interviews are mostly just praising Facebook's Platform -- wait, is this guy on Facebook's payroll?)

1. VentureBeat interview - “In the history of computing, there was the personal computer, there was Windows, there was the web, and now the Facebook platform.”
2. InsideFacebook interview - "We made a big bet on the Facebook platform, and it has already paid off.  Now we’re going all in."
3. OnlineFandom interview - "Already we can tell that iLike on Facebook will be *better* for the consumer than iLike.com on its own."

New iLike Sidebar for iTunes !!

We're excite to release our latest iLike Sidebar for iTunes on Mac and Windows!!

The new iLike Sidebar represents a lot of work we've added in the last few months:

1) We now offer "instant playlists", with a much simpler interface! :-)

2) More recommended music - 6 mainstream songs, 6 free MP3s from GarageBand

3) "Other listeners" view - every time you play a song, see faces of others who listen to the same artist

4) Your iTunes playlists are automatically synced on a daily basis so changes to playlists appear on your profile on iLike.com

There are also a whole bunch of bug-fixes in this latest Sidebar release. We haven't auto-updated our userbase to it (yet), so you need to download it yourself at http://iLike.com/download. Check it out and send us feedback! :)

iLike as a service on Facebook!!

We're excited and proud to announce that iLike has  launched an integrated application within the new Facebook platform. We've been working on this for a long time now, it's taken a TON of hard work (and we've still got a lot to do). But we're excited to let you know we just opened the doors for Facebook users to activate iLike on Facebook!

If you're a Facebook user, you can activate iLike in order to:

• add songs to your Facebook profile
• find concerts matching your tastes and see who else is going
• challenge your friends to a game of name that tune

In addition, iLike provides profile pages on Facebook for over 500,000 artists, including hundreds of thousands of songs by unsigned musicians from GarageBand.com.

We're gonna add more features to iLike on Facebook, this is just the beginning. Facebook made an unprecedented move by opening up their social network to enable companies like ours to build deep, rich applications within the Facebook frame and integrated with the Facebook "social graph". We're excited to be part of this revolutionary change in social networking, and we're thankful to the users who made iLike (so far) the most popular 3rd-party application on Facebook! :-)

In our first 20 hours of opening doors we had 50,000 users sign up, and it is only accelerating. (10,000 users joined in the first 12 hrs. 10,000 more users in the next 3 hrs. 30,000 more users in the next 5 hrs!!)

We started the system not knowing what to expect, with only 2 servers, but ready with backup. Facebook's rabid userbase chewed up our 2 servers almost instantly. We doubled our capacity to catch up. And then we doubled it again. And again. And again. Oh crap - we ran out of servers!! Although iLike.com has a very healthy level of Web traffic, and even though about half of all the servers in our datacenter were sitting unused, idle, as backup capacity, we are now completely maxed out.

We just emailed everybody we knjow across over a dozen Bay Area startups, corporations, and venture firms in a desperate plea to find spare servers so we can triple our capacity for the continued onslaught. Tomorrow we are picking up over 100 servers from different companies to have them installed just to handle the weekend's traffic. (For those who responded to our late night pleas, thank you!)

Today was a critical day in iLike's history. The Facebook Platform enabled us to build a service that in a single day matched and beat the impressive traffic we built on iLike.com in over 6 months. iLike is now growing at more than twice the pace it was yesterday, and accelerating. Fasten your seatbelts everybody, here we come! :-)