A few site hiccups, and *NEW* privacy and invitation features :-)

First the bad news: we had a couple of site outages in the last few days. Sorry! There were two reasons: (1) we had a massive onrush of new users (welcome to iLike everybody! :-) ), (2) our datacenter provider accidentally pulled the plug on our power which caused a multi-hour outage (!). We're really sorry, it was partly our fault, and partly extremely bad luck.

Now the good news: we fixed a number of our most-concerning bugs and added some privacy features and more:

1) playing from an iPod? if you're playing music on your PC from your iTunes, or from a friend's library, or a CD, it plays properly. (PC users, your Sidebar will autoupdate to have this capability. Mac users, it will be a few more days before we autoupdate you)

2) privacy concerns? you can now set your profile to "share only with my friends", so you won't get random people sending you messages (although you may still get friend requests). Also, you can hide your "online now"/"listening now" status if you don't want people to know.

3) bug fixes: most of the users whose music was "still processing" have now been processed. We've improved this so we can take in users *much* more quickly. Users who claimed we double-countved a play when you paused a song, this won't happen again. Also, a few users complained that iTunes got slower because of us. This happened on some PCs because of a bug we fixed. This may still happen on a Mac because (surprisingly) iTunes 7 for the Mac has a massive memory leak (independent of us).

4) improvements for GarageBand artists: HTML-formatted band bios now display right. GB bands show up better in search results. GB bands get links to iTunes if their music isn't free. and bands with accounts flagged for deletion are properly hidden.

5) and the top request: you can customize your friend-invites! people complained that inviting friends was impersonal since you couldn't type a message, like "hey, try iLike, it's like the greatest thing like everrrr!". Or whatever it is you wanted to say. Well, now you can customize your invitations to friends, so please, go nuts, and invite more friends to iLike :-)

Hope you enjoy the new stuff on the site. If you have positive comments, leave them here, but if you want more bug-fixes or new features, the best place to go is to contact us directly from our FAQ (although please search the FAQ to make sure we're not already aware of your request)

Last but not least: this week's quote of the week: "I hate strangers who randomly add me as friends"  by EugeneZ, the hermit of social-networking. (Hey, anybody who reads this, feel free to go find eugenez on iLike and add him to be friends. Welcome to the 21st century Eugene!)

Comments

[Eugene Gordin]

Thank you for all of the updated features. Is there any way to get a forum to give you more feedback?

[conniec]

Howdy! I'm new here. Why do your blog posts have times, but no dates?

Cheers,
conniec

[Deron Dantzler]

I was prompted on my Mac to update to a newer version of the Sidebar. I notice that contrary to this post, I have the double-counting when you pause a song (as of 2 minutes prior to typing this comment).

[mike]

Just wanted to say that I am new to iLike and I think it's the greatest :) I already made two of my friends download it onto their computers.

[Eugene]

The fix for plays with pauses being double-counted will be in the new Mac version that will be released in a few days - sorry the post was not clear on it.

[Tim]

I too am using the latest version of the sidebar for iTunes (Mac) and pausing is still counting a song as being played 2x in a row.

[filchyboy]

Can you be more specific about iPods? I'm not sure I understand.

[Steve]

Hi conniec,

I've just fixed the blog to show the full date and time instead of just the time. Thanks for noticing!

Steve

[paul from germany]

i found a bug *hooray* well kind of...
i'm in europe and having different timezones and all confuses iLike...
it says on an artist page, that i am the last person that listened to this particular artist, but states, that this was 8 hours ago, though it's been like 23 seconds...
maybe you have to implement some sort of timezone setting in the user options ??

apart from that i recently am missing contact photos in my sidebar
+ i am still seeing another guys data, although i've terminated our friendship (didn't like his face ;))

but otherwise it's really awesome...
especially the continuing music previews on long "recently played" lists. not having to click every single song is really great.
thanks alot & rock on, guys

btw: i'm on mac os x

[Paul LaFontaine]

I am still seeing very slow updates of data on my profile page. Almost beginning to lose interest as the information is always wrong or way out of date.

The service is very clever in presenting back to us our 'tastes' then linking us with others. Great. But the most interesting thing is the data. And that is chronically wrong.

Keep trying, but don't ruin a nice start.

Thanks,
Paul

[chris]

iLike is using 575 megs of real memory and 1,012 virtual on my Mac running v 1.0 of iLike.