iLike Team Blog

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! :-)

Adding song-search, and My Concert Wishlist

We just added two highly-requested features to iLike, hope you can check them out:

1) Finally - search results include songs, not just artists
Yes, yes, it's crazy that we didn't have this in the first place, we know, we know. Anyways, you can now type in music search results containing an artist name, song name, or a combination of both, and we do a reasonable job of finding relevant results in all cases. Our new search result layout also does a better job of highlighting the emerging artists at GarageBand, in a two-column view. Check it out! :-)

2) "My Concerts" - a list of your favorite artists touring near you!
Every user of the iLike Sidebar for iTunes now receives a personalized wishlist of "My Concerts", showing all the upcoming shows matching the music you play in iTunes or Windows Media Player. If you don't have the iLike Sidebar, you can build a similar list by rating artists using the convenient iLike buttons - tell us who your favorite artists are, and never worry about missing another concert! (Note:  we are still limited to US-only concert data, and we're also still a little ways away from merging the GarageBand gig-listings into the iLike concert database.)

Lastly, we've brought back the "send to all" choice for sending music recommendations to friends - ever since we dropped this feature back in early February we've noticed not quite as many users sending or receiving music recommendations to each other, so we brought it back!

Concerts near you! (and 1 million users)

We recently added "On Tour" links throughout iLike.com. These links show up for any artist that is performing in a concert we know about. If you tell us your location and we have concert data for your country, we'll only show the On Tour links when there is an upcoming concert near you. (sadly, we only have US data for now, but we're busy expanding that)

We're also telling you about upcoming shows in the iLike Music Update we email you every two weeks. For those of you who have the iLike Sidebar for iTunes or Windows Media Player, this means that we'll send you personalized alerts anytime your most-played artists are coming to town. :-)

One significant caveat: our concert feed currently does not include shows by GarageBand artists yet, and it only promotes shows by artists that you already tell us you like. We're next going to add extend this to cover GarageBand artists, and we'll also tell you about shows by new artists who match your tastes.

iLike has 1 million registered users

In other news, we just announced that iLike has more than 1 million registered users! And for those of you who run the iLike Sidebar, we're collecting data for 200-million played-songs every month! Today is the 6-month anniversary of the October beta-launch of iLike, we're very proud of our growth so far, but we owe it all you, our userbase, for giving us feedback on the features most important to you. Thank you! :-)

Today's quote of the week comes from a colorful duo, Maggie and Josh... Maggie: "did you know hugging is an HR violation at Microsft?" ... Josh: "Maggie, when you hug Marcus it makes me very uncomfortale... I wanna hug Marcus!".  (Sorry guys, had to post that one, it was too good)

Making it easier to share your iTunes playlists

We've added the ability to send a playlist to a friend, or to "iLike" a playlist so it shows up on the main page of your profile:

The "Send" feature let's you share your favorite iTunes playlist with any iLike user, or via email to just about anybody you know. You can also "iLike" a playlist (including playlists sent to you by friends), and you can upload a matching photo or write comments about your favorite playlists:

We've also added handy links to "Play all" songs or "Shuffle" playlists.

And remember, to put your playlists on iLike and keep them in sync you need the latest versions of the iLike Sidebar for iTunes.

Finally, this week's quote of the week comes from Mike (aka iMike), the engineer who built these new features. Mike told me "hey, Josh got weed at the pawn shop downstairs!". I was shocked, and then I learned Josh got "Wii'ed" - he finally bought a Nintendo Wii. Welcome to the club Josh! :-)

Updates to the iLike Sidebar for iTunes

We've posted the latest-versions of the iLike Sidebar for new users to download. We haven't autoupdated all existing users yet, but we're letting you know on this blog so if you're an avid iLike user please visit the link above, get the new Sidebar, and let us know if you notice anything strange or bad.

Note: you probably won't notice anything visibly different, but a lot changed under the covers:

What's new on the Mac: your iTunes playlists are shared!
Previously available only to Windows iTunes users, this is now on the Mac. We've also fixed a small "memory leak" that caused the iLike Sidebar on the Mac to use too much computer memory if left alone for a looooooong time.  (as an aside: if you recently received an auto-update to your iLike Sidebar on the Mac, that was not this update - it was an accidental upgrade but didn't change anything whatsoever. oops!)

What's new on the PC: your iTunes library updates are reflected to iLike.com daily!
On Windows the new iLike Sidebar finally syncs your entire iTunes library data (playlists, playcounts) to our servers on a daily basis. Actually, the sync happens many times a day - so changes in your iTunes playlists/playcounts will show in your most-played-songs and playlists on iLike.com. If you mostly listen to music offline or on your iPod, this means when you sync your iPod your playcounts will finally update on iLike.com daily. And if you ever wanted to "zero-out" playcounts for a particular song, you can finally do that (in iTunes, right-click on the song and select Reset Playcount).  We'll soon add these innovations to the iLike Sidebar on the Mac.

P.S. for those who ask why our Mac Sidebar lags the PC - it's partly because we have more PC users, but also because Apple doesn't support the same 3rd party interfaces on the Mac as on the PC. We also had trouble believing this, but we need to work around short-comings of the Mac iTunes platform where it works better on the PC. (Yes, we're asking Apple to fix it)

Finally, there is no "quote of the week" this week. However, we have an announcement that is near and dear to our hearts: our office manager Maggie Snyder has officially quit smoking for life! We're putting it in the company blog because now she can never go back on her word!

iLike.com new features, and a figurative heart-transplant

FIRST - for those who asked - it's here: we doubled the length of the iLike name-that-tune game. If you were bummed that you "ran out" of quiz questions, you're in luck!! Play now, earn points while you discover new tunes!

New features we just added to iLike:

1) A new view of recent activity among your network
We now show all the "Songs iLike" added by your friends or similar people, as a blog-style list that you can read regularly. People are adding "songs iLike" at a pretty fast clip, so if you add enough friends to your network this is the best way to discover new music!

2) Your iTunes playlists are better integrated on your iLike profile
The picture says it all - we've added "Playlists" as a sub-tab of your user profile, and this will automatically show your playlists from iTunes. This feature is still only available for Windows iTunes users. Mac users, fear not - we're already testing the Mac version in the labs, we'll release it soon!

3) On every artist page, we show recently-recommended songs
When you add a song to your Songs iLike, your comment will (briefly) show up on that artist's page as well. (Note: we've hit some bugs when doing this with artists from GarageBand, we're working on fixing those, but check it out, it makes artist pages on iLike much more lively!)

 

Above all: we replaced the guts of iLike

We recently moved from one datacenter to another, we upgraded all our server equipment, and simultaneously moved our database backend to a new architecture (we "partitioned user-track-data into multiple database shards instead of a single database master").

In English, this all means we spent money, bought new computers and a new space to put them in, redesigned the guts of iLike, and moved everything from the old place to the new place.  This was incredibly complicated, and it unfortunately caused some downtime on iLike.com as we turned on the new systems and confirmed everything was working.

Fortunately, the transition has been smooth afterwards, and now iLike.com will run much faster, your recent-plays in iTunes and Windows Media Player will update much more quickly, and we have enough capacity to grow a lot more with fewer hiccups in the future. :-)

For those of you who are happy that we added RSS feed support for user profiles, we also just added RSS feeds for your "Songs iLike" feed. We will increasingly add more such feeds to the site, thank you for your patience!

Lastly, this week's quote of the week comes from our newest engineer Ray who was slated to join iLike this week along with his friend Scott. Ray emailed our president to sadly announce: "This is very awkward, but Scott and I have been approached by a friend of ours to be co-founders of a new software startup." Naturally, this was a shock to learn the weekend before their start date. Fortunately for all, it was a great April Fool's joke! :-)  Ray is now working full-time on personalized concert calendars matching your tastes.

Similar people, free MP3s, concerts, and more

We just made a bunch of significant updates to iLike, we hope you enjoy these improvements!!

1. Enter more information about yourself
You can finally go to your account settings to enter your ASL (age, sex, location), and other information about yourself to display on your profile on iLike. (We know, many of you have also asked to add greater customization to personal pages including colors, photos, etc, and we'll get to that soon - adding the basic info was the first step.)

2. Get automatic weekly recommendations from GarageBand musicians
We've developed an algorithm to automatically match consumers on iLike to appropriate genres on GarageBand.com. Based on the music you listen to in iTunes and based on the artists you "iLike", we will give you a weekly feed of new music (often free MP3s) from unsigned artists from GarageBand.com, automatically inside your MyHome page on iLike

3. Meet people with similar music tastes
We've had this feature before, but we've now made it easier to discover, directly on your MyHome page. If you don't have enough friends, add some of these people to your friends list so you can receive music recommendations from them! :-)

4. See concert dates for artists on tour
We now show an "on tour" tab for artists that are on a concert tour. This feature is currently powered by a feed from TicketMaster (based on our recent partnership with TicketMaster). There are lots of ways we plan to improve on this. In particularl, we want to do the same thing for artists who have entered gig info on GarageBand. We really hope our partnership with TicketMaster will help improve the concert-related features we can build on iLike. :-)

5. RSS feeds for your profile
We're only getting started on this - lots of the more technical crowd of users on iLike have asked for XML or RSS feeds of the data on profile pages. We've started working on this. Right now if you check to "View All" on a user's Recently Played list of songs, you can get an RSS feed of that data. We'll add these sort of feeds to other places too, this is just the beginning.

In the next few weeks we've got a lot of work ahead of us. iLike is continuing to grow and the growth is continuing to accelerate. We've spent a bunch of effort in building out a new datacenter and over the next few weeks we're gonna be moving a lot of computers and data to the new datacenter, which should have more capacity to handle our growth. We're also going through a complex partitioning / "shard" rearchitecture to help handle our accelerating growth. Hopefully all of this means we continue everything as is and you don't notice anything, even though we have 10 times as many users as we did just a few months ago. However, if there are some bumps along the way in the next month, it's because the movers may have dropped a computer! :-)

Last but not least - this week's quote of the week comes from our Product Manager, Aydin, who exclaimed nervously: "dammit! I accidentally just gave away my MySpace password again!!". (maybe Aydin will post his password on the blog for all of us next time :-))

Share your music tastes on FaceBook :-)

A brief update on iLike.com:

1. You can now share your music tastes on FaceBook. If you have added Songs iLike to your profile, or if the iLike Sidebar is tracking the music you play on your computer, you can now share your music tastes by adding the iLike Widget to your FaceBook minifeed from this page.

2. User-search is back. We turned this off briefly while dealing with some growing pains. In case you didn't read our press release, iLike.com now has over 500,000 registered users, so much of our time is spent simply keeping the site running despite accelerating growth.

3. We're gonna extend the deadline one week for keeping user playlists hidden (only to yourself). If you are using the iLike Sidebar, check your privacy settings to decide whether or not you want to share your music library playlists on iLike (or to choose which playlists to share).

Lastly, this week's quote of the week comes from our engineer Daniel, who has been working on a major new area of the website, and is finally putting together the pieces. When asked whether it's all done yet, he replied: "everything has worked... at least once".  We're thinking it's gonna be a few more weeks before Daniel's project is ready :-)

Top Requested New Feature - Full Playlists

We've had many requests for the ability to view people's full playlist data... and we listened!

We just launched a preview of this feature. To see it, click on 'View my playlists' on your profile page. Your playlists are visible only to you during this preview. However, after March 10th, they will be openly visible on all profile pages, so make sure to adjust your privacy settings if you don't want your playlists to be shared.

Note, the "preview" period only applies to existing users. If you're new to the site since yesterday, your playlist data will already be live. Also, please note that this feature only works with iTunes on Windows for the time being.

Finally, this week's quote of the week goes to Hadi once again... "Uhhh, yea hi, this is Hadi. Uhhh, I won't be able to meet with you today. The other guys will be here but I'm gona have to go. Yea, my wife is most likely giving birth right now...." Congratulations Hadi!