Tons of new features, and iLike hits 25mm users :)

In the last few 12 months iLike has expanded across the web beyond iLike.com to Facebook, Bebo, hi5, and Orkut, and also beyond the Web onto iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the iPhone. A year ago we had just announced 3 million users. Now, one year later, we just passed the 25 million registered user mark. Wow, what a year it's been!

Some great updates on new features we've added since our last blog post...

1) Improved, richer artist pages
The artist pages on iLike.com and across the iLike network now reflect a richer design - we've separated out the artist-uploaded content into different modules for blogs, photos, bulletins, and videos. This particularly lets you more prominently see artist-uploaded videos, since there is a lot of cool stuff that artists have uploaded. For example, in this screenshot, you can see a recent video uploaded by Jason Mraz.

2) Local concert alerts from your favorite artists 
iLike has always kept track of your favorite artists, but in the past we've sent you reminders for concerts in a rolled-up newsletter, and we heard feedback that this sometimes caused people to miss a concert since the information was lost in a bunch of other data.  Now we send you a specific email whenever one of your Artists iLike announces a concert near you (edit your location here). On iLike.com and also on Facebook, you can click "I'm going" or "I want to go", and see who else is going.

On the Facebook version of iLike, you can also invite friends to go to the concert, and see who else in your college or highschool is interested. You can also see all the upcoming local concerts your Facebook friends are going to.

3) Artist-specific quizzes
Actually, we launched this feature a while back on Facebook, but we forgot to blog about it. (oops!). You can now play the iLike Challenge for many of your favorite artists - just pick an artist, visit their page, and click the Play Now button to see how well you can name the songs by the artists. You get 10 questions, up to 100 points, and challenge your friends. :)

 

4) Music recommendations from Facebook friends
On the Facebook version of iLike, you can now recommend music to your friends each time you "iLike" it. The first person across all of Facebook to recommend any song gets a permanent badge on that song's page, but there are also slots available to be the "first" within any smaller Facebook network whether its regional, college, highschool, etc.

Since enough of your Facebook friends are already busy tagging their favorite music on iLike already, we have now started also showing rollups of this week's most popular music among your friends, in your highschool, college, region, etc. This is one of the coolest capabilities we've ever built, because it uses the full power of the social-graph of a site like Facebook, combined with the rich user<->music interactions of iLike, to built a recommendation system tailored to your tastes and your friends. :-)

Anyway, wow, that's a lot to write about, and there's even more but we know you can't read it all. It's been a BUSY month at iLike!   

To close things off, the latest "quote of the week" came from Marcus, our product manager, who handles so much email that he spends hours simply dealing with organizing it: "I think my new job is - I'm a glorified inbox rule!". (we hope Marcus will soon figure out how to set up his inbox rules to work automatically for him.)

In the last few 12 months iLike has expanded across the web beyond iLike.com to Facebook, Bebo, hi5, and Orkut, and also beyond the Web onto iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the iPhone. A year ago we had just announced 3 million users. Now, one year later, we just passed the 25 million registered user mark. Wow, what a year it's been!

Some great updates on new features we've added since our last blog post...

1) Improved, richer artist pages
The artist pages on iLike.com and across the iLike network now reflect a richer design - we've separated out the artist-uploaded content into different modules for blogs, photos, bulletins, and videos. This particularly lets you more prominently see artist-uploaded videos, since there is a lot of cool stuff that artists have uploaded. For example, in this screenshot, you can see a recent video uploaded by Jason Mraz.

2) Local concert alerts from your favorite artists 
iLike has always kept track of your favorite artists, but in the past we've sent you reminders for concerts in a rolled-up newsletter, and we heard feedback that this sometimes caused people to miss a concert since the information was lost in a bunch of other data.  Now we send you a specific email whenever one of your Artists iLike announces a concert near you (edit your location here). On iLike.com and also on Facebook, you can click "I'm going" or "I want to go", and see who else is going.

On the Facebook version of iLike, you can also invite friends to go to the concert, and see who else in your college or highschool is interested. You can also see all the upcoming local concerts your Facebook friends are going to.

3) Artist-specific quizzes
Actually, we launched this feature a while back on Facebook, but we forgot to blog about it. (oops!). You can now play the iLike Challenge for many of your favorite artists - just pick an artist, visit their page, and click the Play Now button to see how well you can name the songs by the artists. You get 10 questions, up to 100 points, and challenge your friends. :)

 

4) Music recommendations from Facebook friends
On the Facebook version of iLike, you can now recommend music to your friends each time you "iLike" it. The first person across all of Facebook to recommend any song gets a permanent badge on that song's page, but there are also slots available to be the "first" within any smaller Facebook network whether its regional, college, highschool, etc.

Since enough of your Facebook friends are already busy tagging their favorite music on iLike already, we have now started also showing rollups of this week's most popular music among your friends, in your highschool, college, region, etc. This is one of the coolest capabilities we've ever built, because it uses the full power of the social-graph of a site like Facebook, combined with the rich user<->music interactions of iLike, to built a recommendation system tailored to your tastes and your friends. :-)

Anyway, wow, that's a lot to write about, and there's even more but we know you can't read it all. It's been a BUSY month at iLike!   

To close things off, the latest "quote of the week" came from Marcus, our product manager, who handles so much email that he spends hours simply dealing with organizing it: "I think my new job is - I'm a glorified inbox rule!". (we hope Marcus will soon figure out how to set up his inbox rules to work automatically for him.)