So we can immediately tell you, “here’s one of your favorite artists with a concert near you, and these are your friends who might wanna go.” Thanks to Facebook, on your very first page view, we know your music tastes, your location, your list of friends, and their music tastes. Thanks to Facebook, the moment a new user visits iLike, the very first page they see is automatically personalized to them already. VB: You’re able to incorporate information from Garageband, right? From that, what sort of traffic are you seeing back to and Garageband from the FB platform? see upcoming concerts, who else in the community is going, etc. It does include the ability to add songs to your pages, but also much more that you get on the app pages themselves - e.g. For example, artist profiles - our app contains 500,000 and growing profiles for artists from major label acts to unsigned artists.
VB: Some Facebook applications are still more viral than others… tell me why iLike is so popular?ĪP: To be honest, we’re not completely sure! There is certainly some art and science to making an app viral, but also a healthy dose of black magicīut for one thing, iLike is quite different from almost all the other apps, in that it’s not simply a “widget” to add to your page, but an entire expansion of the Facebook feature set to add a rich music experience. So, #1 and #2 made this something we had to jump on, and #3 made us comfortable with the long-term strategic implications. Furthermore, they built and launched their own “video” app, but left it to “compete” on its own merits alongside other third-party apps rather than making it “pre-installed” for all Facebook users. For example, they absolutely refused to give us any special advantage, insisting that the market needs to see a level playing field… we offered them ownership in our company, money, etc - but they had no interest. But he makes these calls so we followed him.Īs to what stood out: it’s a combination of 3 things:ġ) The technology itself - Facebook’s platform, like any platform, offers the developer building blocks to build apps faster than they could if they were starting from scratch, and to tap into a rich source of data & capabilities that would never otherwise be available.Ģ) The potential for viral spread - due to the way the Facebook news feed works, an app can spread across the community entirely by viral spread, as friends get notified when one person adopts it… this essentially bypasses the idea of trying to make your app “viral” as a standalone, because the Facebook is itself naturally viral.ģ) The rhetoric from the Facebook management team, starting from the CEO himself, made it clear that they have a long-term commitment to a level playing field. What he said was, “in the history of computing, there was the personal computer, there was Windows, there was the web, and now the Facebook platform.” You can imagine that I and most our company was pretty skeptical. A month ago, even though the Facebook Platform wasn’t fully fleshed out, he saw just from the early beginnings of it that this could redefine web development. VB: What made iLike think that Facebook Platform would be a big deal? What stood out about it?ĪP: Hadi has a strong background in the concept of platforms… at 24 he became the head of product management in the IE group at Microsoft, and was a key player in the browser wars. First two or three people, then a few more, and by the end it was a huge group of engineers pulling back-to-back all-nighters for a week-long sprint to the launch. We re-prioritized everything else, and started moving our people off other projects onto this. But when we finally did get access, our President, Hadi Partovi (my twin brother) took very little time to decide this was a huge strategic priority. We then gave up a bit, and we were actually a bit late to the game learning about the platform in detail. They repeatedly said they won’t do an exclusive relationship, but would rather create a level playing field where we could compete with other third parties. What’s the status? Do you have enough servers now?ĪP: So, first to give you the back-story on how we got involved: Over the past several months, we’ve pushed and pushed with Facebook asking for some sort of exclusive relationship.
Yet on the integration since Friday morning, there have been bugs and other issues on iLike’s end. You’ve been working on putting iLike on Facebook for several months now. VB: Tell me about your experiences with Platform so far.
He compares Facebook’s platform to the web itself. We interviewed iLike chief executive, Ali Partovi. It is by far the most popular application. A few days after social network site Facebook opened its platform to third-party sites, iLike, a popular music sharing site has scored 723,936 users on Facebook.
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