iLike Team Blog

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."