iLike Press Coverage

(Spin Magazine) "Neko Case: The New Pornographer-gone-solo releases her new single to support animal rescue"

As Neko Case gears up to release Middle Cyclone March 3, the alt-country firebrand is giving her fans a glimpse into the eye of the storm by offering Cyclone's first single, "People Got A Lotta Nerve," as a free download.

Along with the song, Case and her record label, Anti-, have pledged to donate to the animal rescue organization Best Friends Animal Society for every blog and iLike profile that posts "People Got A Lotta Nerve." So if you love animals (and, judging from some of Case's album titles, we know she does), make sure to take part in this charitable promotion -- but act fast: the song is only available until February 3. 

(VentureBeat) "Custom tags to make Facebook apps faster, more interesting and ubiquitous"

Facebook is now letting third-party application developers create their own snippets of code, called “custom tags.” These tags can be used to make an application perform better as well to build features from one application into another application. For example, a game app could use these tags to integrate a song from a music application.

Facebook also plans to further develop these tags for Facebook Connect, a service that lets third-party sites do things like let users sign in and comment using their Facebook identities. One day, these sites could embed Facebook applications as widgets, making the sites more valuable using the social identity of Facebook users.

Here’s an example from Facebook about how these tags might be used:

So if you’re an application developer and want to make your application even more content rich — say by including music or news — consider using an available custom tag set. For example, if you’re building a wedding site and want to include a playlist of top wedding songs, you can use the iLike custom tag to embed a playlist of top wedding songs. See below for more information about iLike’s custom tags and other examples.

The custom tags make use of Facebook’s existing proprietary markup language for app development, called FBML — a simple format that the thousands of Facebook app developers are already familiar with. For developers, here’s a custom tags directory that Facebook has created to help get you started.

Click here to view playlists created with iLike's custom tags

(TechCrunch) "Facebook Lets App Developers Swap Content With Custom Tags"

by Erick Schonfeld on January 13, 2009

Facebook took a step today to increase the cross-pollination between the more than 40,000 social apps built on top of its platform. Those apps are written in Facebook Markup Language (FBML, it is Facebook’s version of HTML). FBML has something called “tags” which call up Facebook content inside each app. Now app developers can add “custom tags” to expose their own content to other app developers, and thus spread it programmatically. Some examples include adding playlists from iLike to other apps, a badge from Causes, or a list of the most popular books from Visual Bookshelf.

 

If you’ve built an application with a lot of rich content, and you want to extend its reach and share that content with other Platform applications, create some custom tags and share this content with the community. Custom tags are easy to use and are a great way for you to extend your application’s distribution.

There is no need for app developers to reinvent the wheel if other apps have already gathered great content and data that can be used in an existing app. For instance, if music isn’t central to an app, why not just add it from iLike? It might make iLike more popular, but it also lets other developers piggyback on all the work that iLike’s has already done. And by presenting iLike’s playlists in a new context, maybe mixed and matched with elements from other apps, in the end you have a whole new app.

(The New York Times) "Facebook Makes Its Markup Extensible"

[Excerpt]

By MARSHALL KIRKPATRICK

Facebook announced a major change today to the proprietary language that all Facebook apps are written in; it will now be made extensible with custom tags that can be shared across applications. The feature will initially be available only on site but will eventually be rolled out to all Facebook Connect supporting sites around the web. We're excited about it but wonder how open it will truly be.

FBML, or Facebook Markup Language as it's called, was intended to ensure that malicious apps couldn't inject nasty code into the browsers of users. We assume that the new markup will have security taken care of by server side processing and this could enable an explosion in feature sharing and code efficiency.

Showcase examples at launch of the feature include:

    * iLike offers tags that let you display favorite songs and playlists, complete with controls to listen, dedicate, watch, and make ringtones of those songs.

    * Causes offers custom tags that let you show your support for your favorite

      causes by displaying badges that invite users to join and support the cause.

    * Graffiti offers tags that let you draw and display graffiti.

    * * Visual Bookshelf offers tags show the most popular books by category.

(Rolling Stone Magazine) "How to Save Rock & Roll"

Nine insiders who are reshaping the music biz for 2009 and beyond

You might not know it, but the two guys pictured above have already changed the way you consume music. Ali and Hadi Partovi are the founders of iLike.com, the top music application on Facebook. By harnessing the power of one of the largest online social networks, the pair have created an interconnected universe of 30 million fans. Why does that matter, how did they do it and who else is shaping the future of the rock business? Check out our special feature on nine insiders with unique visions for the music biz, from video-game developers to a box-set maker to Broken Social Scene’s best pal.

The Big Idea: Founded iLike, the top music application on Facebook, creating an interconnected universe of 30 million fans.

Why It Matters: iLike elegantly connects the world of social networking and music fandom and encourages those 140 million Facebook-ers to sample new acts and make playlists and recommendations — plus buy more than $15 million worth of MP3 downloads, merch and concert tickets (Ticketmaster owns 25 percent of the company). "We know who people's friends are and what their tastes are," Hadi Partovi says. "If you find a concert you want to go to, our user interface already knows where you live and whether that artist is playing near you."

How They Did It: The Iranian-born, Harvard-educated twins first worked together on Garageband.com, a social-networking site that predated MySpace, but never caught on. "You could have a band at the top of the Garageband site, but still nobody would hear it," Ali Partovi says. "I felt it was necessary to work with some other media channel that had a consumer audience." Within weeks of debuting, the iLike application on Facebook gathered millions of users.

What's Next: Like MySpace, iLike is working aggressively with the record industry to market music online without alienating fans from buying it. And attitudes at major labels about free Internet music are changing — slowly. "The major labels are trying out a lot of things now that they may not have been trying out a few years ago," Ali Partovi says, noting that albums from R.E.M., Thievery Corporation and Nine Inch Nails have premiered on iLike. "I'm excited about this period because we're in this experiment. There are so many models being tried out, and one of them is bound to be better than the old model — which, I think you'll agree, is broken."

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