March 25th, 2008
imeem brings licensed music to the Platform party
Another day, another platform.
This time it’s imeem’s turn to offer third-party developers a way to build applications for its media-oriented social networking site.
The imeem Media Platform “enables developers to quickly create applications for imeem that integrate our community, features, and our music, video, and photo content”, according to the site. More specifically, imeem is offering third-parties the hooks to tap into users’ social graphs (including friends and associated profile data), along with all of the media housed on the site and with the inherent licensing issues taken care of. The latter is quite a big deal as it significantly lowers the barriers (i.e. cost) to developing rich content-centric web apps, such as music and video mash-ups/games or any kind of application where IP rights would otherwise need to be secured first. In addition, the Media Platform API offers uploading and transcoding of media content and access to imeem’s recommendation engine — again, all at no cost.
There is a catch, however.
According to paidContent, while all developers are being given access to imeem’s sandbox, the company will choose “best of” apps to make available to the imeem community through a directory. In other words, it’s not clear if all applications will make the cut, and depending on how transparent the process is, this could be a good of bad thing for both developers and end users. MySpace’s developer platform also has a similar vetting process.
Here’s a full list of what imeem is offering:
- Access any of the millions of songs, videos, and photos available on imeem
- Fully customize the imeem media player (via a “chromeless” player)
- Upload music, videos, or photos, and modify metadata for that content
- Access imeem’s social graph, including users, friends, and associated profile data
- Create, edit, and manage new playlists, or access millions of music, video and photo playlists created by imeem users
- Search imeem’s media content by keyword, artist, song title, or album
- Access imeem’s recommendation engine and discovery tools
imeem also says it plans to add OpenSocial support in a future update to its Media Platform.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
