iLike Press Releases

KEITH URBAN AND iLIKE ANNOUNCE MULTI-TIERED RELATIONSHIP OFFERING FANS EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

iLike Users Now Eligible To Participate in a Pre-Sale of Keith Urban’s 2008 Tour Date Tickets

SEATTLE – November 15, 2007 – iLike, the Web’s leading social music service, and Keith Urban, the GRAMMY® Award winning musician, songwriter and performer, today announced a multi-tiered, multi-month collaborative relationship. Keith Urban, whose Greatest Hits:18 Kids streets on November 20, will make an exclusive series of weekly videos, which will provide unique, behind-the-scenes access to Urban from the road. The videos will be made available to Urban’s more than 300,000 fans on iLike, and syndicated across multiple websites including iLike’s popular application on Facebook® Platform, using iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard and iCast multi-media blogging tools. In return, iLike will promote Keith’s tour dates on strategic locations throughout iLike.com and the iLike application on Facebook, as well as featuring Urban in a print advertising campaign.

“The Internet and services such as iLike are all about community and the ability to discover new artists, and music, through word of mouth,” said Urban.  “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.”

“We are delighted to be collaborating with Keith Urban, an artist with not just immense talent but also a passion for new technology,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. “Our new Universal Artist Dashboard offers Keith a channel to reach the most fans with the least effort, with a syndicated presence on iLike, Facebook and beyond. We’re delighted to collaborate with Keith Urban and our friends at Borman Entertainment to further our vision of giving every artist a channel to communicate directly with anybody who likes their music.”

The first in a series of exclusive Keith Urban videos will be shot and posted on Urban’s iLike Artist Page on November 16 during an invitation-only fan and media event timed to correspond with Urban’s Chicago tour date at Allstate Arena. A select group of iLike fans and members of Keith Urban’s online community, Monkeyville, will be invited to attend Keith’s Chicago concert as well as an intimate meet-and-greet in Keith’s backstage lounge. The fans will film their experiences and post the resulting footage on Keith’s online fan wall located on his iLike Artist Page (www.iLike.com/keithurban).

The Chicago event will be the first in an ongoing series of joint Keith Urban/iLike fan events timed to correspond with Urban’s 2008 tour dates. Urban will also create a weekly series of intimate, raw videos in the coming months, which will be available exclusively on his iLike Artist Page and syndicated to users on Facebook and other iLike syndication channels following their preview for 24 hours on Urban’s online members-only fan community, Monkeyville.

Exclusive Ticket Pre-Sale
To celebrate the launch of this on-going initiative, Keith Urban is offering a 30-day trial membership to his online community, Monkeyville, to fans who join Keith's iLike fanbase before December 16. By clicking "iLike This Artist (Keith Urban)," these new trial members will be given the opportunity to purchase tickets to the “Love, Pain & the whole crazy Carnival Ride Tour” before the general public. Members of Monkeyville also have exclusive access to behind-the- scenes photos, Keith's personal video blogs, Monkeyville message boards, members-only content, and more. To learn more or participate, visit: www.iLike.com/keithurban.

Post Once, Publish Everywhere
As the dominant music application on Facebook Platform, iLike’s convenient Universal Artist Dashboard has already been broadly embraced by the music industry and over 150,000 artists. The Universal Artist Dashboard gives artists one automated control center from which to reach Facebook users as well as fans across many other sites, including iLike.com, Ask.com, desktop plug-ins for iTunes® and Windows Media Player®, and many more, including MySpace and Orkut, to come soon.

The leading artists who actively manage their presence on Facebook and beyond via iLike’s Universal Artist Dashboard include hundreds of established, award-winning acts. In fact, every major artist in the world already has an active and highly-trafficked profile within the iLike application on Facebook, complete with songs, concert dates, news and fan communication tools.

Now just one year old, iLike is already one of the fastest growing music services in the world, with 15 million users worldwide and three million more being added monthly.

For more information about iLike Artist Services Platform, or to sign up as an artist, visit: www.iLike.com/forartists.

About Keith Urban’s Tour and New Album
For more information about Keith Urban’s Greatest Hits:18 Kids and upcoming “Love, Pain & the whole crazy World Tour” dates, go to: www.keithurban.net or www.iLike.com/Keithurban.

About iLike, inc
iLike is the Web's leading social music discovery service and the dominant music application on the Facebook Platform. With more than 15 million registered users, iLike helps people share music recommendations, playlists, and personalized concert alerts. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player suggests new music, creates automatic playlists, and connects people through music. iLike offers musicians and labels a Universal Artist Dashboard from which to reach fans and manage their presence across multiple channels: Facebook, iLike.com, Ask.com, iLike Sidebar plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player (and soon, through adoption of Google OpenSocial, also Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Ning, and other leading social networking sites). By leveraging iLike's "artist-fan graph," a vast database of connections between consumers and their favorite artists, iLike helps artists reach their fans and cultivate the viral spread of their music. iLike, inc also runs indie music site GarageBand.com.

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Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. iTunes® is a registered trademark of Apple Inc.  Windows Media Player® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.

Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web

Support for Common Set of APIs Includes Bebo, iLike, MySpace, orkut, and Salesforce.com

November 2, 2007

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Google, Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) today announced the release of OpenSocial -- a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features. OpenSocial will unleash more powerful and pervasive social capabilities for the web, empowering developers to build far-reaching applications that users can enjoy regardless of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use. The release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.

The proliferation of unique APIs across dozens of social websites is forcing developers to choose which ones to write applications for – and then spend their time writing separately for each. OpenSocial gives developers of social applications a single set of APIs to learn for their applications to run on any OpenSocial-enabled website. By providing these simple, standards-based technologies, OpenSocial will speed innovation and bring more social features to more places across the web. Users win too: they get more interesting, engaging, and useful features faster.

“The web is fundamentally better when it’s social, and we’re only just starting to see what’s possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web,” said Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering, Google. “There’s a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web social.”

Learn Once, Reach Across the Web

One of the most important benefits of OpenSocial is the vast distribution network that developers will have for their applications. The sites that have already committed to supporting OpenSocial -- Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, mixi, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING -- represent an audience of about 200 million users globally. Critical for time- and resource-strapped developers is being able to “learn once, write anywhere” -- learn the OpenSocial APIs once and then build applications that work with any OpenSocial-enabled websites.

“Thanks to the broad adoption of the OpenSocial platform, iLike can now enable artists to reach an additional 200 million music enthusiasts across the wide range of websites that have adopted this new platform,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of social music service iLike, inc. “Building upon the 15 million music fans we already reach through other channels, the OpenSocial platform helps us pursue our vision of becoming the broadest artist-fan communication platform on the web, without having to write custom software for multiple websites.”

Several developers, including Flixster, FotoFlexer, iLike, RockYou, Slide, Theikos, and VirtualTourist have already built applications that use the OpenSocial APIs. A developer sandbox will be available soon at http://sandbox.orkut.com so developers can go in and start testing the OpenSocial APIs. The goal is to have developers build applications in the sandbox so they can deploy on orkut and ultimately other OpenSocial sites.

More Social in More Places

The existence of this single programming model also helps websites that are eager to satisfy their users’ interest in social features. More developers building social applications more easily translates directly into more features more quickly for websites.

“orkut has tens of millions of passionate users who are constantly clamoring for new ways to have fun with their friends and express themselves through orkut,” said Amar Gandhi, group product manager for orkut, Google’s social networking service. “By using OpenSocial to open up orkut as a platform for any developer, we can tap into the vast creativity of the community and make new features available to our users frequently.”

The common method that OpenSocial provides for writing social applications means that websites can engage a much larger pool of third-party developers than they could otherwise. They can direct resources that might have gone to maintaining a proprietary API and supporting its developer community to other projects.

“We are thrilled to be supporting OpenSocial,” said Marc Andreessen, Co-founder and CTO of Ning. “These standards give both creators and members of the over 113,000 social networks on Ning an awesome breadth of feature options and an even greater opportunity to make their networks uniquely their own. OpenSocial is the future.”

Because OpenSocial removes the hassle from developing for social networks, developers can unleash their creativity anywhere that catches their interest. This will translate into a wave of social features in contexts outside of the personal entertainment and games that are traditionally thought of as the social web.

“We fundamentally believe that OpenSocial is the right design philosophy,” said Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn. “Some social experiences are about photo sharing, some are affinity-based, some professionally oriented--OpenSocial allows each experience to be distinct and provides them a shared infrastructure for development.”

“Our goal is to make life as simple as possible for developers who want to reach the global hi5 audience,” said Ramu Yalamanchi, CEO of hi5. “OpenSocial provides a simple and practical open standard approach that encourages developers to build innovative applications.”

“OpenSocial is an evolutionary step in the integration of third-party applications into the social web,” said Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide. “Google's standards-based platform gives us deeper access to multiple networks, which allows us to create a much richer user experience.”

“The Internet has fundamentally changed the expectations that consumers have for business applications,” said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing, salesforce.com. “By combining the Force.com Platform and Visualforce with the latest OpenSocial APIs, developers and customers can build and deploy a new class of socially-enabled enterprise applications in a way that improves CRM, collaboration and other business workflows.”

Three APIs Available Now

The OpenSocial APIs give developers (with users' permission) access to the data needed to build social applications: access to an application user's profile information, their list of friends, and the ability to share their activities with friends. OpenSocial resources for developers and websites will be available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Developers will have access to:

- Three JavaScript and Gdata APIs to access social functions

- A live developer sandbox on orkut at sandbox.orkut.com

- Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at code.google.com

Websites will have access to:

- A tool to help OpenSocial-enable their websites

- A support forum for communicating with Google and other websites

- Sample code, documentation, and a support group available at code.google.com

Developers Already at Work

Dozens of developers have helped test early iterations of the OpenSocial APIs, and Google is grateful for the extensive feedback they have provided:

amiando
Appirio
Bleacher Report
BonstioNet
Brad Anderson
Bunchball, Inc.
BuyFast
Cardinal Blue Software
Chakpak
Chronus Corporation
come2play
CurrentTV
E-junkie
eTwine Holdings, Inc.
Fiendoo Ltd
Flixster
FotoFlexer
Grimmthething
HedgeStop.com
Hungry Machine
iFamily, Inc.
iLike
Indeed.com
KickSports, Inc.
LabPixies Ltd.
LimitNone
LjmSite
LoveMyGadgets
Mesa Dynamics, LLC
MuseStorm Inc.
Netvibes
NewsGator
NY Times
Oberon Media
Outside.In
PayPal
PROTRADE
Puxa
Qloud
RockYou
Shelfari
SideStep, Inc.
Slide
Theikos
TooStep
VirtualTourist
Votigo
Whizz
Widgetbox
Zytu Inc.
Links to these gadgets will be available at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

About Google Inc.

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

Google, orkut, and OpenSocial are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the companies with which they are associated.