iLike

» see ilike.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ilike was a music recommendation app that briefly looked like the future of social music. brothers hadi and ali partovi launched it in october 2006 with an itunes sidebar that recommended songs based on your listening, then ported the same logic to facebook in may 2007 the day facebook opened its platform to outside developers. on facebook ilike took off in a way the desktop sidebar never had. by november 2007 it claimed more than fifteen million users.

the partovis raised money fast. ron conway and marc benioff invested. steve jobs reportedly offered fifty million dollars for the company in 2008. ali turned it down, saying ilike was worth three times that. it was not. in august 2009 myspace bought ilike for a fraction of the jobs offer, somewhere in the thirty-million range. by then facebook had quietly changed its platform rules and ilike's growth had stopped.

facebook in 2007 and 2008 was full of apps like this. you scrolled through a friend's profile and saw a wall of ilike noise next to top friends and superpoke. i had a facebook account in that period and remember the apps not for what they did but for the visual clutter they made on every profile page. ilike was the music one. it played thirty-second clips at you when you visited certain pages, which was either fun or annoying depending on whether you were the host or the visitor.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

facebook opened its developer platform in may 2007. within weeks ilike was the first app to hit a million installs. by july it was the largest application on the platform, ahead of every other early entrant. it was a clean viral-loop product: when you installed ilike, every friend's profile started showing your listening preferences, which made other friends install ilike to see theirs.

the partovis already had pedigree. ali had been an executive at microsoft. hadi had been a senior product person at microsoft and tellme. they were the kind of founders who could call investors directly and get meetings the same week. for about eighteen months that was enough.

~ the decline ~

facebook changed the rules. through 2008 and 2009 it tightened how apps could push notifications, how they appeared on profiles, how their virality worked. the changes were aimed at every gift-and-poke app on the platform, but ilike took the brunt of them because most of its growth had come from being installed automatically as a profile widget. once facebook stopped letting apps auto-add themselves to profiles, the wall feature went quiet. growth flattened.

then myspace bought it on 19 august 2009. by then myspace itself was losing teenagers to facebook at scale. an acquisition between two companies that were both losing their position in social music was not the rescue ilike's investors had hoped for. the partovis stayed on briefly, then left.

~ the long tail ~

ilike's facebook app closed on 7 february 2012. the site redirected to myspace music, which was itself a corpse by then. the partovis went on to other things. hadi co-founded code.org in 2013, which became the largest computer-science-education nonprofit in the world. ali kept investing and ran his own venture firm. of all the facebook-platform-app founders of 2007, the partovis are the ones with the most coherent post-acquisition careers.

the music-on-social-network category never came back in the same shape. spotify got a facebook integration around 2011 and then absorbed the role ilike had played. the wall of friends' songs became a real-time spotify scrobble bar. it was a less interesting version of what ilike had pioneered, but it ran at scale inside spotify rather than on top of facebook. that was the whole shift.

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