iLike Team Blog

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.