Imeem steps up in the race

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Imeem Opens Its Massive Media Catalog to Third Parties
By Eliot Van Buskirk EmailMarch 25, 2008 | 8:32:02 AMCategories: Digital Music News, Music Software and Sites, Music Widgets, Social Media

Imeemapps Like MySpace and Facebook before it, imeem will allow third-party software developers to create applications that run on its music-oriented social network, it announced Tuesday.

This puts imeem's massive catalog of licensed music at developers' disposal. The service has deals with all four major labels and many indies that allow its users to legally post just about any song for others to enjoy.

Applications created by outside developers using the imeem Media Platform will have access to the entire catalog, which could make for some compelling music-discovery and listening tools. Every photo and video on the site is also fair game.

Using the just-released application programming interface, or API, developers will also be able to offer a customized imeem media player, automate the uploading of content, create playlists, add favorites to users' profiles and leverage "imeem's social graph, including users, friends and associated profile data," according to the service.

Imeem says its API will differ from its MySpace and Facebook counterparts by letting developers build the site's music, videos and photos into their apps:

Imeem is providing the imeem Media Platform, as well as the underlying infrastructure for hosting, transcoding and delivering media, for free. Developers supply the creativity; imeem provides the rest, including access to our growing community of over 24 million users.

This is much bigger than just allowing people to port their existing apps to imeem -- it’s about enabling a new wave of completely new apps, powered by imeem’s video, music and photo content. Other social networks have opened their platforms to third-party developers; only imeem is providing the critical media piece of the puzzle.

In the coming months, imeem says it plans to add support for OpenSocial so apps created for MySpace, Hi5 and other networks can be ported over.

Developers who want to get started creating an imeem app should head to the site's developer area for access to the API. As for the rest of us, we can sit back and wait for the apps to show up.