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Welcome to the iLike Developer Platform
What is the iLike Developer Platform?
The iLike Developer Platform is a simple tool that enables Web sites and Web applications to build interactive music features while respecting the rights of the creators of the music and their labels / publishers. Having spent years building the underlying technology for iLike's music service, we decided to help other developers build interactive Web services that use our underlying technology, without requiring difficult coding, without requiring too much server-side engineering, and without having to understand the hassles and complexities of the world's vast catalog of music.
We've designed this platform to enable basic features but also rich integration, all with the simplicity of a few lines of Javascript code. With the iLike Developer Platform, creating interactive music features for your Web site is something that can now be done in a matter of minutes!
Support for Facebook Platform
Because iLike has had such tremendous success and growth within the Facebook Platform, we've decided to give a little something back to the Facebook developer community, by enabling iLike's song and playlist modules to be added interactively to any Facebook application using just a few lines of FBML. If you want to add a single song or a playlist to a gift, poke, event, or game, it's as easy as adding a few lines of script, and we will take care of the rest.
Support for OpenSocial platform
Because the OpenSocial platform is built using regular HTML and JavaScript, there is nothing unique that anybody needs to do for the iLike Developer Platform to add music and playlists to OpenSocial applications. All of the HTML code-snippets and samples work exactly the same within regular Web sites or within OpenSocial apps. Thank you to the OpenSocial community for making it so easy!
Documentation
- Overview and getting started
- iLikeDisplaySong - to display a single song
- iLikeSongChooser - to allow a user to search and select a song
- iLikeDisplayPlaylist - to display an editable playlist
- DeveloperKeys - information about developer keys
- If you have any questions, join our developer mailing list
Examples
- Simple song object on an Web page (HTML)
- Simple song object inside a Facebook app (FBML)
- Screenshots of launch partners - Evite, Flixster, TypePad, Blogger, and more
Common questions
Where does the music come from?
The iLike catalog of music comes from a variety of sources - via direct deals with record labels or music aggregators, via iLike's relationship with Rhapsody, or uploaded directly by artists (via the iLike Artist Dashboard).
Note: when the music is played via the iLike partnership with Rhapsody, users get to enjoy 25 full songs per month, and then it will fall back to 30-second streams, and the user will be prompted to subscribe to Rhapsody for Unlimited music playback.
How much does it cost?
The iLike Developer Platform is free for you (developers), and for your users. How much does it cost us to provide it? To be perfectly honest, we're not exactly sure, because we don't know all the ways developers will use this platform. Here's the basic value exchange: if you build a popular Web site or application using this platform, then your users will see lots of songs which mention the iLike brand, with links to artist-pages within iLike, or links to buy or subscribe to enjoy music via iLike's affiliate partners. If your users click those links and buy stuff, iLike should earn something (we hope). When your users play music on our dime, it costs us something. We're starting with the hope that it simply breaks even. If it turns out to be profitable, we may find a way to share revenue with our best developers. If a few developers use the system a ton and it costs us too much to support them, we may ask them to help us cover the costs. But for now, the service is free, please use it and build cool stuff, and if you build something that's really popular, we're sure we can all make something good come of it.
What if I want to play music across pages?
Check out our Thoughts for the next version. Our next step is to build a pop-out player so that music across the iLike network and the iLike Developer Platform may be enjoyed within a standalone player - so that the music doesn't stop when you navigate from one page to the next.
Disclaimer, and looking forward
We are just getting started on this, so please bear with us as we fix or add stuff here in the future. In particular, we're pretty open about our Thoughts for the next version - we know there's a lot of possibilities for new ideas and improvements.
