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 :-))
How about combining location info and concert listings -- so "On Tour" would only show up for artists within a user-definable radius of one's location?
Posted by: Derick | March 23, 2007 at 08:31 AM
As one of the "more technical crowd of users" on iLike, I thank you for implementing RSS for recent plays, and look forward to seeing that little orange icon on more pages in the future. Finally, iLike can take its rightful place in the sidebar of my blog!
Posted by: Ryan | March 23, 2007 at 11:31 AM
so is it because of #2 why all these genres are automatically attaching themselves as friends to people's pages? that seems kind of spam-like, actually. the recs are cool, but the friend thing seems kind of unnecassary.
Posted by: craig | March 23, 2007 at 01:22 PM
Finally, iLike can take its rightful place in the sidebar of my blog!
Posted by: Bob | July 03, 2007 at 01:02 PM
Yeah!!! Great job :-)
Looking forward to all these new improvements.
It'd be great to be able to use all the iLike features embedded on my artist's official homepage so they may use the iCast as their main blogging tool.
Carlos
Posted by: Carlos | February 20, 2008 at 09:03 AM