iLike Team Blog

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!