iLike Team Blog

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!

Concerts near you! (and 1 million users)

We recently added "On Tour" links throughout iLike.com. These links show up for any artist that is performing in a concert we know about. If you tell us your location and we have concert data for your country, we'll only show the On Tour links when there is an upcoming concert near you. (sadly, we only have US data for now, but we're busy expanding that)

We're also telling you about upcoming shows in the iLike Music Update we email you every two weeks. For those of you who have the iLike Sidebar for iTunes or Windows Media Player, this means that we'll send you personalized alerts anytime your most-played artists are coming to town. :-)

One significant caveat: our concert feed currently does not include shows by GarageBand artists yet, and it only promotes shows by artists that you already tell us you like. We're next going to add extend this to cover GarageBand artists, and we'll also tell you about shows by new artists who match your tastes.

iLike has 1 million registered users

In other news, we just announced that iLike has more than 1 million registered users! And for those of you who run the iLike Sidebar, we're collecting data for 200-million played-songs every month! Today is the 6-month anniversary of the October beta-launch of iLike, we're very proud of our growth so far, but we owe it all you, our userbase, for giving us feedback on the features most important to you. Thank you! :-)

Today's quote of the week comes from a colorful duo, Maggie and Josh... Maggie: "did you know hugging is an HR violation at Microsft?" ... Josh: "Maggie, when you hug Marcus it makes me very uncomfortale... I wanna hug Marcus!".  (Sorry guys, had to post that one, it was too good)

Making it easier to share your iTunes playlists

We've added the ability to send a playlist to a friend, or to "iLike" a playlist so it shows up on the main page of your profile:

The "Send" feature let's you share your favorite iTunes playlist with any iLike user, or via email to just about anybody you know. You can also "iLike" a playlist (including playlists sent to you by friends), and you can upload a matching photo or write comments about your favorite playlists:

We've also added handy links to "Play all" songs or "Shuffle" playlists.

And remember, to put your playlists on iLike and keep them in sync you need the latest versions of the iLike Sidebar for iTunes.

Finally, this week's quote of the week comes from Mike (aka iMike), the engineer who built these new features. Mike told me "hey, Josh got weed at the pawn shop downstairs!". I was shocked, and then I learned Josh got "Wii'ed" - he finally bought a Nintendo Wii. Welcome to the club Josh! :-)

Updates to the iLike Sidebar for iTunes

We've posted the latest-versions of the iLike Sidebar for new users to download. We haven't autoupdated all existing users yet, but we're letting you know on this blog so if you're an avid iLike user please visit the link above, get the new Sidebar, and let us know if you notice anything strange or bad.

Note: you probably won't notice anything visibly different, but a lot changed under the covers:

What's new on the Mac: your iTunes playlists are shared!
Previously available only to Windows iTunes users, this is now on the Mac. We've also fixed a small "memory leak" that caused the iLike Sidebar on the Mac to use too much computer memory if left alone for a looooooong time.  (as an aside: if you recently received an auto-update to your iLike Sidebar on the Mac, that was not this update - it was an accidental upgrade but didn't change anything whatsoever. oops!)

What's new on the PC: your iTunes library updates are reflected to iLike.com daily!
On Windows the new iLike Sidebar finally syncs your entire iTunes library data (playlists, playcounts) to our servers on a daily basis. Actually, the sync happens many times a day - so changes in your iTunes playlists/playcounts will show in your most-played-songs and playlists on iLike.com. If you mostly listen to music offline or on your iPod, this means when you sync your iPod your playcounts will finally update on iLike.com daily. And if you ever wanted to "zero-out" playcounts for a particular song, you can finally do that (in iTunes, right-click on the song and select Reset Playcount).  We'll soon add these innovations to the iLike Sidebar on the Mac.

P.S. for those who ask why our Mac Sidebar lags the PC - it's partly because we have more PC users, but also because Apple doesn't support the same 3rd party interfaces on the Mac as on the PC. We also had trouble believing this, but we need to work around short-comings of the Mac iTunes platform where it works better on the PC. (Yes, we're asking Apple to fix it)

Finally, there is no "quote of the week" this week. However, we have an announcement that is near and dear to our hearts: our office manager Maggie Snyder has officially quit smoking for life! We're putting it in the company blog because now she can never go back on her word!

iLike.com new features, and a figurative heart-transplant

FIRST - for those who asked - it's here: we doubled the length of the iLike name-that-tune game. If you were bummed that you "ran out" of quiz questions, you're in luck!! Play now, earn points while you discover new tunes!

New features we just added to iLike:

1) A new view of recent activity among your network
We now show all the "Songs iLike" added by your friends or similar people, as a blog-style list that you can read regularly. People are adding "songs iLike" at a pretty fast clip, so if you add enough friends to your network this is the best way to discover new music!

2) Your iTunes playlists are better integrated on your iLike profile
The picture says it all - we've added "Playlists" as a sub-tab of your user profile, and this will automatically show your playlists from iTunes. This feature is still only available for Windows iTunes users. Mac users, fear not - we're already testing the Mac version in the labs, we'll release it soon!

3) On every artist page, we show recently-recommended songs
When you add a song to your Songs iLike, your comment will (briefly) show up on that artist's page as well. (Note: we've hit some bugs when doing this with artists from GarageBand, we're working on fixing those, but check it out, it makes artist pages on iLike much more lively!)

 

Above all: we replaced the guts of iLike

We recently moved from one datacenter to another, we upgraded all our server equipment, and simultaneously moved our database backend to a new architecture (we "partitioned user-track-data into multiple database shards instead of a single database master").

In English, this all means we spent money, bought new computers and a new space to put them in, redesigned the guts of iLike, and moved everything from the old place to the new place.  This was incredibly complicated, and it unfortunately caused some downtime on iLike.com as we turned on the new systems and confirmed everything was working.

Fortunately, the transition has been smooth afterwards, and now iLike.com will run much faster, your recent-plays in iTunes and Windows Media Player will update much more quickly, and we have enough capacity to grow a lot more with fewer hiccups in the future. :-)

For those of you who are happy that we added RSS feed support for user profiles, we also just added RSS feeds for your "Songs iLike" feed. We will increasingly add more such feeds to the site, thank you for your patience!

Lastly, this week's quote of the week comes from our newest engineer Ray who was slated to join iLike this week along with his friend Scott. Ray emailed our president to sadly announce: "This is very awkward, but Scott and I have been approached by a friend of ours to be co-founders of a new software startup." Naturally, this was a shock to learn the weekend before their start date. Fortunately for all, it was a great April Fool's joke! :-)  Ray is now working full-time on personalized concert calendars matching your tastes.

Similar people, free MP3s, concerts, and more

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 :-))

Share your music tastes on FaceBook :-)

A brief update on iLike.com:

1. You can now share your music tastes on FaceBook. If you have added Songs iLike to your profile, or if the iLike Sidebar is tracking the music you play on your computer, you can now share your music tastes by adding the iLike Widget to your FaceBook minifeed from this page.

2. User-search is back. We turned this off briefly while dealing with some growing pains. In case you didn't read our press release, iLike.com now has over 500,000 registered users, so much of our time is spent simply keeping the site running despite accelerating growth.

3. We're gonna extend the deadline one week for keeping user playlists hidden (only to yourself). If you are using the iLike Sidebar, check your privacy settings to decide whether or not you want to share your music library playlists on iLike (or to choose which playlists to share).

Lastly, this week's quote of the week comes from our engineer Daniel, who has been working on a major new area of the website, and is finally putting together the pieces. When asked whether it's all done yet, he replied: "everything has worked... at least once".  We're thinking it's gonna be a few more weeks before Daniel's project is ready :-)

Top Requested New Feature - Full Playlists

We've had many requests for the ability to view people's full playlist data... and we listened!

We just launched a preview of this feature. To see it, click on 'View my playlists' on your profile page. Your playlists are visible only to you during this preview. However, after March 10th, they will be openly visible on all profile pages, so make sure to adjust your privacy settings if you don't want your playlists to be shared.

Note, the "preview" period only applies to existing users. If you're new to the site since yesterday, your playlist data will already be live. Also, please note that this feature only works with iTunes on Windows for the time being.

Finally, this week's quote of the week goes to Hadi once again... "Uhhh, yea hi, this is Hadi. Uhhh, I won't be able to meet with you today. The other guys will be here but I'm gona have to go. Yea, my wife is most likely giving birth right now...." Congratulations Hadi!

 

Improved widget to share your music tastes (on MySpace, etc)

We've updated iLike.com 3 times this week, so if you're subscribed to our blog, sorry for so many updates all in one week. We just improved the iLike.com widget for sharing your music tastes on MySpace or other websites. The improvements are:

1) You can now share your "songs iLike" and "most-played-songs" on MySpace.

2) You no longer need the iLike Sidebar to get an iLike widget. Just add some "songs iLike" to your profile, and you can share them on MySpace too.

Here is the widget showing the music from our co-founder Hadi's iTunes library: (note: if you are reading this blog in an RSS reader, the widget may not display properly)

If you have an account on iLike and have downloaded the iLike Sidebar for iTunes, you can add this widget to your MySpace, or visit that page to read instructions for adding it to other websites or blogs.

Meanwhile, we also made a number of quick performance fixes to improve the speed of our Web site - our userbase is growing at an accelerated pace so every week involves a lot of database and server work simply to keep up with the growing traffic on the Web site.

If you've been tracking this blog, you'll be excited to know we have a special feature unveiling coming next week. (It's the #1 most-requested feature among the music consumers on iLike. It's almost ready, so we're gonna unveil a preview-version on the website to get feedback and then improve it more).

Finally, congratuations to our final set of iPod winners! Make sure to check out www.iLike.com/bonus for the latest giveaway.

Musically similar people, and a music-blog view

Oops, we forgot to mention to changes that came out with the last site push:

1) Musically similar people
We updated the friends-tab on iLike so you can view a whole list of musically-similar people who share your music tastes, along with the music that they recently recommended, or added to their libraries.

Check it out, this is one of the coolest ways to discover new music. You don't need to bother clicking to go all the way to their profile pages, you can simply use the cursor up/down keys to find new music from people who share your music tastes. :-)

2) Music-blog view of Songs iLike
Separately, just as an added touch one of our engineers (Steve) added nice date-stamps and full text layout to the Songs iLike on profile pages. This means that when you "iLike" a song, you're adding to a blog on your page - it really makes profile pages easier and more fun to read.